Making Writing Come Alive
In today’s Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reviews a book that is about to be published by Cornell entitled My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan D. Blum, an anthropologist at Notre Dame. Her argument is not a new one; writing scholars have been making much the same argument for some time now. (See Rebecca Moore Howard’s Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (Greenwood, 1999), Howard’s new book with Amy Robillard Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies (Boynton/Cook 2008), and a new essay collection (published by Utah State UP two months ago) edited by Carol Peterson Haviland and Joan A. Mullin entitled Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures. See also Barry Gilmore’s how-not-to books on plagiarism for students and teachers. And here is a previous CompSpot post on the topic.) But it’s good to have someone else joining the fray as well. There are way too many triumphant plagiarism-catchers out there who don’t know the difference between plagiarism and the improper (untrained) use of sources. The more people we have trying to educate these indignant warriors, the better.
Blum’s argument, based on a qualitative research study she conducted into students’ attitudes toward plagiarism at Notre Dame, is that while students know that buying papers from paper mills is wrong, they really see nothing wrong with borrowing other people’s ideas without attribution. Who really owns ideas and words anyway? They circulate. Her analogy is with P2P music downloads, which students continue to participate in and justify despite enormous legal pressures from the music industry and their own universities. That seems like a really lousy analogy to us writing instructors, but students do seem to lump the P2P sharing of ideas and words and music all together. Ironically, given the deep conservatism of most of our students, for them it’s a kind of happy communist utopia in which all property is collective, to be shared. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If you can write a song or a paper, you share it with those who can’t. It’s that simple.
And there’s something powerfully attractive about that idea--and, as Blum says, with her anthropological background, the “culture” based on it. And to some extent even the harshest anti-plagiarism norns believe in that culture too, and participate in it. After all, what’s the difference, structurally speaking, between allusion and plagiarism? In both you use someone else’s words without attribution. (It’s teh lame, as the leetists would say, to cite your source for an allusion. Here's how lame I am: I "quoted" Marx allusively, without attribution, in that last paragraph.) The only real difference is that in allusion the speaker or writer expects the listener or reader to recognize the quotation, and understand what the speaker or writer is doing with it. But what if you misjudge your audience, and they don’t recognize the allusion? It happens all the time. Then the (quite legal and ethical and widely accepted) cleverness of allusion becomes virtually indistinguishable from plagiarism.
The only problem with this happy communistic culture is that it isn’t widespread enough for our students to get away with it. Capitalist intellectual property laws are still in place. And even though those laws are extremely complex, so complex that even writing instructors can’t untangle all the complications, they are based on the ideology according to which property is owned by an individual person or corporation and anyone who uses that property without proper attribution (and in many cases payment of permission fees) is a thief, to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It is this punitive mentality that leaches down into the academy and takes the form of anti-plagiarism jihads, often conducted by professors who profess to despise capitalism. And it is this punitive mentality that Blum wants to defang--well, a little. She still wants to catch and punish people who buy papers from paper mills, or who copy whole papers from the Web. But, like all of us compositionists who have been trying to educate colleagues and students on this matter for years, she wants to offer a less punitive attitude toward inadvertent plagiarism--which is to say, toward the improper use of sources. We have to teach students to summarize, paraphrase, quote appropriately, and critique other people’s writing. It’s very hard to do well. Some of our colleagues, in fact, don’t seem to know how to do it; and it’s amply evident that they don’t know how to teach their students how to do it.
How? The model I like to give my students is a spoken conversation with friends, where one friend has an unpleasant habit of repeating other people’s words, clever phrases, jokes, and stories, and taking full credit for them, as if s/he had made them up. To the extent that the whole group recognizes that this is going on, they tend to roll their eyes at such behavior: it is just too lame for words. If you’re so boringly unoriginal that you can’t come up with your own stuff, at least have the decency to say “I really like what Mary always says …” and then quote or paraphrase what Mary says. Give credit where credit is due. When a bully or showoff in a group systematically steals one person’s lines and takes full credit for them, and the group doesn’t notice--or pretends not to notice, because they’re so enamored of this person--the friend whose lines are getting stolen usually gets extremely angry and resentful. (A lot of sketch comedy is devoted to this sort of situation.)
This is a culture that students are familiar with. It’s a culture that they value highly, and one that is steeped in the collective values surrounding friendship. The only trick in getting them to transfer their values governing “intellectual property” in conversation with friends to the kind of academic intellectual property that we value and they often don’t is that they aren’t friends with the people they steal from. The value system that governs their conversation with friends doesn’t seem to apply to situations where the people aren’t friends--indeed, where the authors of the writings they borrow without attribution aren’t really “people” at all, but mere dead words on the page. Since we tend to meet these people at conferences, and become friends with them, and generally participate in the scholarly conversations in our field as if the authors we haven’t met could become friends (or for that matter enemies, but in any case living, breathing human beings), this seems cold and uncaring to us; but our students aren’t old enough or established enough or interested enough to join in the scholarly conversation at our level, so the sources they use do seem to them basically just dead black marks on the page.
The answer? Make writing come alive for them. Have them read two or three articles by professors on campus, and then have those professors come in and address the class, or send a student to interview each and report back.
That still won’t make it easy for them to master the complexities of summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and critiquing. That’s never easy, even for those of us who have been doing it for decades. But at least then they may come to see the importance of trying to master those complexities.
Blum’s argument, based on a qualitative research study she conducted into students’ attitudes toward plagiarism at Notre Dame, is that while students know that buying papers from paper mills is wrong, they really see nothing wrong with borrowing other people’s ideas without attribution. Who really owns ideas and words anyway? They circulate. Her analogy is with P2P music downloads, which students continue to participate in and justify despite enormous legal pressures from the music industry and their own universities. That seems like a really lousy analogy to us writing instructors, but students do seem to lump the P2P sharing of ideas and words and music all together. Ironically, given the deep conservatism of most of our students, for them it’s a kind of happy communist utopia in which all property is collective, to be shared. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If you can write a song or a paper, you share it with those who can’t. It’s that simple.
And there’s something powerfully attractive about that idea--and, as Blum says, with her anthropological background, the “culture” based on it. And to some extent even the harshest anti-plagiarism norns believe in that culture too, and participate in it. After all, what’s the difference, structurally speaking, between allusion and plagiarism? In both you use someone else’s words without attribution. (It’s teh lame, as the leetists would say, to cite your source for an allusion. Here's how lame I am: I "quoted" Marx allusively, without attribution, in that last paragraph.) The only real difference is that in allusion the speaker or writer expects the listener or reader to recognize the quotation, and understand what the speaker or writer is doing with it. But what if you misjudge your audience, and they don’t recognize the allusion? It happens all the time. Then the (quite legal and ethical and widely accepted) cleverness of allusion becomes virtually indistinguishable from plagiarism.
The only problem with this happy communistic culture is that it isn’t widespread enough for our students to get away with it. Capitalist intellectual property laws are still in place. And even though those laws are extremely complex, so complex that even writing instructors can’t untangle all the complications, they are based on the ideology according to which property is owned by an individual person or corporation and anyone who uses that property without proper attribution (and in many cases payment of permission fees) is a thief, to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It is this punitive mentality that leaches down into the academy and takes the form of anti-plagiarism jihads, often conducted by professors who profess to despise capitalism. And it is this punitive mentality that Blum wants to defang--well, a little. She still wants to catch and punish people who buy papers from paper mills, or who copy whole papers from the Web. But, like all of us compositionists who have been trying to educate colleagues and students on this matter for years, she wants to offer a less punitive attitude toward inadvertent plagiarism--which is to say, toward the improper use of sources. We have to teach students to summarize, paraphrase, quote appropriately, and critique other people’s writing. It’s very hard to do well. Some of our colleagues, in fact, don’t seem to know how to do it; and it’s amply evident that they don’t know how to teach their students how to do it.
How? The model I like to give my students is a spoken conversation with friends, where one friend has an unpleasant habit of repeating other people’s words, clever phrases, jokes, and stories, and taking full credit for them, as if s/he had made them up. To the extent that the whole group recognizes that this is going on, they tend to roll their eyes at such behavior: it is just too lame for words. If you’re so boringly unoriginal that you can’t come up with your own stuff, at least have the decency to say “I really like what Mary always says …” and then quote or paraphrase what Mary says. Give credit where credit is due. When a bully or showoff in a group systematically steals one person’s lines and takes full credit for them, and the group doesn’t notice--or pretends not to notice, because they’re so enamored of this person--the friend whose lines are getting stolen usually gets extremely angry and resentful. (A lot of sketch comedy is devoted to this sort of situation.)
This is a culture that students are familiar with. It’s a culture that they value highly, and one that is steeped in the collective values surrounding friendship. The only trick in getting them to transfer their values governing “intellectual property” in conversation with friends to the kind of academic intellectual property that we value and they often don’t is that they aren’t friends with the people they steal from. The value system that governs their conversation with friends doesn’t seem to apply to situations where the people aren’t friends--indeed, where the authors of the writings they borrow without attribution aren’t really “people” at all, but mere dead words on the page. Since we tend to meet these people at conferences, and become friends with them, and generally participate in the scholarly conversations in our field as if the authors we haven’t met could become friends (or for that matter enemies, but in any case living, breathing human beings), this seems cold and uncaring to us; but our students aren’t old enough or established enough or interested enough to join in the scholarly conversation at our level, so the sources they use do seem to them basically just dead black marks on the page.
The answer? Make writing come alive for them. Have them read two or three articles by professors on campus, and then have those professors come in and address the class, or send a student to interview each and report back.
That still won’t make it easy for them to master the complexities of summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and critiquing. That’s never easy, even for those of us who have been doing it for decades. But at least then they may come to see the importance of trying to master those complexities.
posted by Doug Robinson at
10:44 AM
2 Comments:
I love the idea of having students read articles by professors on campus then actually MEETING them! Am I naive in thinking that if students knew how easy research amd documentation really is they wouldn't be so tempted to plagiarize? Phyllis Nobles
Well, I don't know about EASY ... I think you can make research fun, especially in 101, but I don't think incorporating sources into a research paper is ever EASY ...
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