This idea predates modernism, with the quote by Edgar Allan Poe, "There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration.
They state that "productive participation involves appropriation and re-appropriation of the familiar" in a manner that conforms to existing discourse and audience expectations.
They state that "in a general sense, postmodern theories, and following them, cultural studies, offer a useful way of understanding assemblages (and the related process of remixing) as simultaneously social and textual structures."
Assemblage allows such authors to alter existing texts and combine them with original work in order to meet the demands of a writing situation or problem.
Remix, originally referring to a reworked song, has been extended to describe any significant alteration of media, most commonly film and literature.
Johnson-Eilola and Selber claim that remix "can aid invention, leverage intellectual and physical resources, and dramatize the social dimensions of composing."
However, they also recognize that "remixing as a form of composition inhabits a contested terrain of creativity, intellectual property, authorship, corporate ownership, and power."
The sociological practice of articulation, as described by Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, among others, refers to the appropriation of elements of culture by various social groups.
Johnson-Eilola and Selber assert that despite shifting attitudes in academia, work produced by students at the scholastic and collegiate level is still evaluated in terms of its originality.
First, the authors find that evaluating students for their originality is "increasingly unrealistic in our postmodern age" as this method is based on antiquated ideas of creativity.
Patchwriting "involves copying from a source text then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-to-one synonym-substitutes.