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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Plagiarism is a hot topic these days on college and university campuses. In response to what they see as a raging epidemic, many colleges and universities have written or rewritten “Honor Codes”; others have turned to plagiarism detection software, which compares student writing to a database of other writing, usually including other student work and anything available on the Internet; and some schools have begun to use or require texts like Charles Lipson’s Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. In their book Student Cheating and Plagiarism in the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call Ann Lathrop and Kathleen Foss assert that it’s agreed upon by academics that (1) cheating is rampant, made easy by new electronic technologies, and (2) plagiarism is a deliberate, malicious attempt on the part of students to get by with doing less. One solution they offer is character education, including the teaching of ethics (5). All of these efforts, and others, are intended to curb “rampant plagiarism,” or what author David Callahan calls a “culture of cheating” (xvi) on campus.
Whether there really is an “epidemic” of cheating is still open to debate. At least one study claims that “serious cheating on tests [. . .] increased from 39 percent [of students] in 1963 to 64 percent in 1993,” but “serious cheating on written work remained stable [. . .] at 65 percent in 1963 and 66 percent in 1993” (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield, qtd. in Blum 2). What such a study doesn’t do well is distinguish between schools or types of schools, or between subjects, or kinds of assignments. Nor does it consider plagiarism as anything other than a form of cheating. It also relies on students’ self-reporting—and as the same authors suggest elsewhere, and one author shows in this volume, students may not consider certain acts as “cheating,” even though their teachers might view the same practices as plagiarism.
How did we get here? Concern about academic integrity is an old story, of course. Indeed, the fear of cheating in general has plagued education for decades. Longwood University, for example, has had an Honor Code in place since 1910. The code was re-ratified in 1930 and includes the Twelve Points of the Honor Code (virtues that define honor), the Honor Pledge, the Academic Pledge, and the Honor Creed. Longwood’s website boasts: “As one of the most respected traditions at Longwood University, the Honor System promotes an atmosphere of trust, where students are presumed honorable unless their actions prove them otherwise” (“The Honor Code”). In a matriculation tradition, first-year students traditionally attend an Honor Code signing ceremony where they read and sign a promise to adhere to the Honor Code. Elsewhere, The College of William & Mary’s honor code proudly boasts a history that goes back to 1736; new students are “administered” the honor code by other students (“Honor Code & Councils”).
Obviously, an honor code would not be deemed necessary were there no fear of plagiarism; thus, it is important to consider the history of plagiarism on campus and what impact the recent perception of its massive growth has had on the composition classroom. In writing specifically, plagiarism has been on the radar of teachers and students for quite some time. In his 1944 College English article “Let’s Teach Composition!” Edward Hamilton, in a partial defense of college students’ inability to engage outside ideas without being taught how, criticizes the instructor who does not offer students enough training in research:
Never having been trained to search out assumptions, interpretations, or conclusions in the essays contained in their anthology, [the students] turn in papers that are reminiscent of Literary Digest articles—mere chains of quotations joined by platitudinous links that reveal their incomprehension rather than represent their efforts to be unbiased. It is not surprising, furthermore, that almost every paper contains instances of innocent plagiarism. (160)
Only fifteen years later, however, in a 1959 issue of College Composition and Communication, Leo Hamalian turns the blame on the students themselves as he bemoans the problem of plagiarism in the composition classroom, and cites an Ohio State University survey that found that two thirds of students surveyed “said they would cheat if they had the chance” (50). His position sounds oddly familiar to today’s academics who complain about the effort involved in catching cheaters and in the prevalence of plagiarism: “teachers whom the author queried [. . .] admitted that plagiarism was fast becoming the collegiate counterpart of juvenile delinquency” (50). According to Hamalian, it is a student’s lack of time management, inability to engage a topic that is irrelevant to him or her, or the fact that he or she is “disturbed emotionally” (52) that leads to his or her cheating in composition, and Hamalian makes a case to his teacherly readers that “plagiarism can be controlled by the methods” he puts forth in the article. Sound familiar? This cat-and-mouse dynamic between teachers and their cheating students is not new.
Despite these early forays into the subject, plagiarism has been slow to emerge as a major concern in composition studies; yet, the issue cuts to the core of writing pedagogy and theory. Despite decades of process pedagogy(s), discussion of plagiarism remains locked in a product-oriented paradigm; but what is plagiarism if not a question of process? Traditional views would see it simply as avoiding or circumventing the writing process, but a more complicated view shows that writing processes—reading, analyzing, understanding, synthesizing, and integrating the writing of others—always touch upon and often overlap with the notion of plagiarism. Indeed, these are basic concepts of theories of writing as a social process.
Aside from this fundamental relationship between composition theory and plagiarism, there are other important reasons plagiarism is, or should be, a central concern of composition studies—practical, institutional, and cultural (i.e., technological) reasons. On a practical level, plagiarism at least seems virtually ubiquitous across composition courses and programs. This is so much the case that almost every first-year rhetoric and research guide has something to say on the subject. Moreover, because, obviously, students are typically expected to write a great deal more in writing courses, and class size is relatively small, teachers of writing are more likely to encounter plagiarism, intentional and unintentional, and/or to recognize it; they are also best positioned to recognize and take advantage of teachable moments. However, why limit discussions to those few, scattered, and idiosyncratic moments? Why not, instead, create opportunities to teach about the murky territory of plagiarism in advance?
There are, likewise, important institutional reasons for composition studies to claim plagiarism. When Deans of Students, Provosts, and Offices of Judicial Affairs constitute and reconstitute “plagiarism” in simple, uncritical ways and in so many different ways across (and sometimes within) institutions, the issue can become seriously confused. Further, these myriad constructions of plagiarism shape student-teacher relationships in ways that are beyond our control, unless the issue is foregrounded in explicit, complex ways. While the field rightfully resists the notion that first-year composition be a “dumping ground” for whatever doesn’t fit neatly into the curriculum elsewhere, compositionists must also ask, “If we don’t take charge of this issue, who will?”
Institutional concerns are particularly true with the advent of plagiarism detection software, which raises our next important set of reasons for plagiarism to be a central concern of composition studies: the cultural or, in this case, the technological. Developing technologies, one might say, have forced composition studies’ hand on the issue of plagiarism. As Charles Moran argued in 1993, and Cynthia Selfe in 1999, developing technologies have fundamentally altered both writing processes and, therefore, the teaching of composition. We should not underestimate the role technology has played in the recent development of the cultural issue of plagiarism. Despite longstanding “honor” traditions, anti-plagiarism policy statements, and professors’ many seemingly ironclad anti-plagiarism strategies, plagiarism as an issue has had an especially powerful effect on the field of composition and rhetoric in the years since computer technology and the Internet were introduced. It is both a growing topic of scholarly discussion—philosophically, politically, and academically—and a marketable one. As plagiarism has become perceived as an epidemic and a scourge upon academic ethics, it has consequently become a big business, and technology seems to be playing a major role. In fact, we can use technology itself to show us just how much more culturally visible plagiarism has become: A simple Google Scholar citation search for “plagiarism” in the publication title field yields 139 citations from the years 1950 to 1980, and 4,280 citations for the years 1981 to 2012.
The assumption, supported by a lot of anecdotal evidence, seems to be that the explosion of the Internet over the last 15–20 years has caused a massive increase in plagiarism. The argument is that it’s now easier to cheat—to cut and paste material from a website, or to download a paper from an online paper mill—and so students are doing it more than they ever have. Resisting this claim, Donald L. McCabe and Jason M. Stephens make an argument that the Internet is not the cause of increases in plagiarism but is rather “just a conduit, offering a more expedient means of engaging in a behavior that one is already doing.” In other words, the cheaters were going to cheat anyway, and now they have the convenience of technology and the Internet to help them. A second technological consideration is the rise of plagiarism detection services (PDSs) such as Turnitin. Services like Turnitin require a subscription fee, and universities invest in subscriptions and then urge, if not require, students and faculty to use the services. PDS software’s emergence and popularity on college campuses has a significant impact on composition studies, in scholarly conversations, in teachers’ practice, and in students’ perceptions about writing (see Donnelly, et. al.).
These technological facets of the plagiarism issue bear heavily on scholarly discourse in the field of composition studies. As with many issues relating to writing pedagogy, there is much debate; in the case of plagiarism, however, ethics in teaching are often called into question, which is serious business in composition and rhetoric. PDSs take on a celebration and criticism of their own, and they become the springboard for passionate discussions about best practices in teaching. In his attempts to carefully analyze Turnitin, Bill Marsh points out
that while recoding plagiarism detection as pre-emptive education, Turnitin.com still makes its money by pulling unoriginal work out of a sea of so-called originals. In short, Turnitin.com profits by battling those instances where learning goes wrong but nonetheless must dress its combative strategy in the uniform of pre-emptive educational reform. (“Turnitin.com” 435)
While his words don’t overtly criticize the instructors who use Turnitin’s services, the embedded message in his analysis is that those educators who use it as an anti-plagiarism tool may be contributing to Turnitin’s duplicity, which indirectly challenges their ethics as teachers. On the high school English front, however, Thomas Atkins and Gene Nelson turn to Turnitin as a source of ethics enculturation:
If students are allowed to use others’ words and ideas as their own, they deny themselves the opportunity to develop writing fluency and critical thinking skills. This service is not designed to be punitive; it is meant to be preventive. The main goal of TurnItIn.com is to help students maintain their ethics and academic integrity, while learning the skills that will help them communicate effectively. (101)
With so many scholars in composition studies trying to investigate the values and writing relationships that students bring with them to postsecondary education, the words of Atkins and Nelson become critical to the conversation on plagiarism in college composition. Yet the conversation becomes even more complicated by the pointed criticism of Rebecca Moore Howard, who has studied and written extensively on the issue, and who does not hesitate to write candidly about how she believes PDSs erode the identity of students and the ethos of the teacher:
Type in your credit card number, paste in a student’s paper, press a button, and voila! Plagiarist caught or writer exonerated; anxiety assuaged. Catching plagiarists is just as easy and requires just as little thinking as does the plagiarizing. [. . .] Plagiarism-detecting software also helps teachers describe the issue solely in terms of individual students’ ethics, thereby avoiding the difficult task of constructing pedagogy that engages students in the topic and the learning process and that persuades them not just that they will be punished for plagiarizing but that they will able to and glad to do their own writing. In place of the pedagogy that joins teachers and students in the educational enterprise, plagiarism-detecting software offers a machine that will separate them [. . .]. (“Understanding” 8, 11–12)
In reading these voices, it’s not difficult to hear the tensions. After all, at the heart of this conversation about plagiarism is the teaching of writing; and at the heart of teaching writing are the teachers’ and students’ goals toward clear, well-supported, ethical, authentic communication. Plagiarism seems to undermine those goals, and much of the scholarship in the field of composition and rhetoric on plagiarism reveals the rescue mission that teacher-scholars on all sides of the issue have undertaken.
Likewise, the looming issues of plagiarism influence the relationships between teachers and students as they impact the environment of the composition classroom. Expanded honor codes, plagiarism policies on syllabi, and the use of PDSs can create an “atmosphere of mistrust” that Sean Zwagerman argues “over time, settles in as normal and invisible, [where] statistical justification for acts of vigilance become unnecessary” (678). If composition instructors take for granted that students will cheat if given the chance, the fundamental tenets of composition pedagogy are compromised. At risk is that the atmosphere of the composition classroom can become infected with the fear of getting caught cheating (or wrongly being accused), as well as teachers’ dread of the tiresome and upsetting process of catching and prosecuting cheaters. The normalization of this atmosphere cannot leave the composition classroom unaffected.
As for plagiarism’s marketability, the mere presence of such a large volume of publications—many of them books designed for classroom use—indicates that there is money to be made off of plagiarism, or off of attempts to prevent it. This question of “marketing” and “management” ideologies in a traditionally more theoretical academic environment can be problematic. How can students explore the more abstract complexities of authorship, ethos, and writerly voice under these conditions? Is the “business” of plagiarism and the politics of its construction interfering with pedagogy and inquiry?
One of the problems with all of the discussion around plagiarism is that it assumes that the term “plagiarism” is easily defined and obvious to all. We hope this book will illustrate how this belief is far from true, and how thinking through the various conceptions of “plagiarism” is critical in understanding its origins, manifestations, and prevention. A second and related problem is that classroom and institutional discussions and policies about plagiarism often conflate intentional and unintentional plagiarism. One strain of the books written about plagiarism—like Lathrop and Foss’s Guiding Students from Cheating and Plagiarism to Honesty and Integrity: Strategies for Change—assumes that the issue is a question of cheating versus being honest—again, an issue only about students’ ethics. A second strain, one more typically directed at students, views plagiarism as a kind of trap for unwary students; Linda Stern’s What Every Student Should Know About Avoiding Plagiarism is just one example of a number of books that refer specifically to “avoiding” plagiarism, as if it’s lurking out there, waiting to ensnare you if you’re not careful. These two strains reveal a broad spectrum of plagiarism definition that calls students’ agency into question: Plagiarism can be about the questionable values that students possess, and it can be about their ignorance altogether.
Both sides of the spectrum, of course, have some merit to them. Some students will cheat, but we see no reason to assume most students are cheaters. Many students lack the necessary knowledge about documentation, of course, and students often plagiarize without intending to; however, the set of conventions governing academic writing is complex and sometimes confusing. Learning to navigate those conventions successfully is a long, arduous process, and not something one does by learning a simple list of rules; understanding plagiarism is more than just learning how to cite properly—and the stakes are high. Academic institutions in the United States, and elsewhere, place a high value on particular notions of creativity, originality, and authorship. Adherence to that value constitutes, in the academy’s view, integrity, but those notions of creativity, originality, and authorship are hardly universal. They vary among cultures—and not just cultures according to nationality, race, or ethnicity but also social class, region, religion, and other social groups to which people belong. Students entering academia bring with them a variety of cultural values that sometimes differ from the values of academic institutions. As new members of the academic community, students are in the process of learning a new set of values, and of negotiating between those values and the values they have brought with them. This socialization plays a significant role in students’ literacy learning, and it is a necessary—but unexamined—part of the conversation that should take place between students and teachers about plagiarism.
Plagiarizing, of course, regardless of intention, is not a problem isolated to composition studies, but because teaching academic writing conventions has historically been perceived as the purview of English departments generally and first-year composition teachers specifically, this issue has been the subject matter of many scholarly articles and books within that discipline. Because plagiarism, as opposed to “mere” cheating on an exam, generally involves passing off someone else’s text as one’s own, English and Writing departments (and the first-year writing divisions specifically) in higher education have been relied upon to teach students about plagiarism—its definitions, how to avoid it, and the repercussions of it. While course policies with broad statements about plagiarism have expanded syllabi, and classroom lessons incorporate the subject, there is no quick fix that will universally solve the problem of plagiarism. Teachers of writing and scholars in composition studies have begun to recognize and discuss the complexity of the issues surrounding plagiarism in a third strain of books, such as Rebecca Moore Howard and Amy Robillard’s Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies. Yet, such books are written by scholars for other scholars. Intentionally or unintentionally, they tend to exclude students from the conversation about student writing. Books written for students, however, continue to emphasize simplistic definitions of plagiarism, to exhort students to “do their own work,” and to focus on “cheating” or “avoiding” plagiarism.
That’s where this book comes in. As editors of this volume, we reject from the outset the notion that students are fundamentally cheaters. As both teachers of writing and composition scholars, we understand that students plagiarize—intentionally and unintentionally—for a wide variety of reasons. In fact, we are uneasy even with the simple distinction between intentional and unintentional plagiarism because the issue itself is so fraught with philosophical, political, and cultural elements that need to be taken into account before we can even begin to judge an act as “on purpose” or “by mistake.” We likewise have rejected simplistic definitions and all-purpose guides for avoiding plagiarism. Because we are more interested in teaching students than in catching cheaters, we believe students and teachers together need to discuss the very notion of plagiarism, in a variety of cultural contexts. In other words, we want to invite students into the academic conversation about plagiarism. Only in this way, can we achieve true education and help students improve as writers.
We assume, then, that most of you reading this book are undergraduate students (probably in an advanced writing course), or graduate students (who may or may not be new teachers yourselves), or teachers of those courses and/or graduate students. We have encouraged the authors collected here to address both students and teachers as their primary audience, but their essays are specifically, and intentionally, academic. As a student, then, you are likely to encounter concepts with which you are familiar, but in new and more complex ways, as well as concepts with which you are less familiar. This is, as we view it, the nature of higher education. Some of the essays here will explore differing perceptions of plagiarism—between students and teachers, between writing and music, between different cultures. Some will draw connections or distinctions between popular culture—artists like Kanye West and shows like South Park—and academic culture. Others still are based on more traditional forms of academic research. None of them offers The Answer. Instead, our hope is that you—students and teachers—will engage in deep, serious discussion about the complexity of “plagiarism” and the variety of issues it raises.
You will also find that this collection is enriched with some selections from interdisciplinary studies, literature, and technical communication scholars as well as a middle school teacher. The border of composition studies touches and interacts with writing practices in every discipline, certainly. Writing-across-the-curriculum and writing-in-the-disciplines initiatives, for example, are built through interdisciplinary collaborations and held in esteem by teachers across campuses. Literature and technical communication, though, are connected to composition even more closely in our focus on reading and writing, albeit from different perspectives. Scholars from these sister disciplines contributed pieces we felt were essential to presenting the issues surrounding plagiarism in their fullness. Composition studies intersects middle and high school writing pedagogy as well; concurrent credit courses are common now in every state, calling on universities and middle and high schools to share theories and practices with one another. Thus, the voice from middle school was important to providing a more complete picture of a far-reaching and complicated issue. In short, the present collection benefits from conversations about plagiarism occurring in the disciplines most closely connected to those in composition scholarship.
Part I. Definitions of Plagiarism: Distinctions, Laws, and Rules
We begin this volume, as any good critical study should, with a discussion of definitions. Simplistic definitions of plagiarism, we believe, have done more harm than good. Thus the essays collected in Section I look at plagiarism from a variety of perspectives that expose and examine some of the gray areas in and between definitions. Phillip Marzluf has developed a set of specific, hypothetical cases of “plagiarism” and asked both students and teachers to identify those that are, in fact, plagiarism. The results of his study illustrate not only that students and teachers often disagree about what constitutes plagiarism but also that teachers sometimes disagree among themselves. Students and teachers alike can use this study to begin their own discussion of what does or does not count as plagiarism and why. Moreover, this study should inspire larger questions about what difference these classroom definitions might make to the field in general: If the composition classroom becomes the laboratory for how we conceptualize plagiarism, how do these locally changing definitions shape how scholars in the field talk to one another and promote national statements on the issue?
The most important point, we argue, is not that any particular act does (or does not) constitute plagiarism, though there are greater and lesser degrees of consensus on different scenarios; rather, there are clearly differing definitions in play, and moreover, no one definition is equally germane to all possible scenarios. One way to more fruitfully explore these competing definitions is to compare notions of plagiarism to other, related concepts, as Jessica Reyman (Chapter 2) and Esra Mirze Santesso (Chapter 3) do. In asking, “Is All Copying Theft?” Reyman untangles the terms “copyright infringement” and “plagiarism.” In so doing, she offers a part of the plagiarism discussion that is fairly new to composition pedagogy, which has taken for granted that students would learn to engage research in their writing development: the rights and responsibilities of students using outside sources. What are they? What is at stake? While she acknowledges the many ways writers may cheat, she argues against the tendency to quickly condemn all acts of copying as plagiarism and supports a concept of “allowable copying,” which she believes to be inherent in successful academic work in the digital age. Situating a similar sort of discussion in the literature classroom, in Chapter 3 Santesso teases out the differences in meaning among concepts of plagiarism, borrowing, imitating, reworking, and reinterpreting, arguing that we must understand these differences or run the risk of oversimplified understandings of literature and confusion over the value of intellectual collaborations and artistic dialogue.
These discussions of the definitions and meanings of plagiarism demonstrate, as Paul Parker argues in Chapter 4, that avoiding plagiarism is not merely adherence to a set of technical rules but rather a complicated process involving the development of critical, “authorial judgment.” It is assumed in composition pedagogy that writers must learn to navigate a complex set of texts, distinguish between the ideas of others and their own, and determine the extent to which attribution is necessary in a particular set of circumstances. It’s a tall order, and few students develop a meta-awareness of how the synthesis of these skills should “look” in a text. Sure, students may read academic texts for their content; but how often do they examine the mechanical construction of those texts as researched documents? Examining the linguistics of source integration in a series of specific texts, Parker shows how academic authors construct meaning as they make informed citation decisions in their analyses.
Part II. Texts, Technologies, and Surveillance
Competing definitions and conflicting contexts are especially significant in the digital age in which we live, work, and write, and the changes in digital technologies is at the heart of much discussion in composition studies. Thus in Part II we turn to discussions of a variety of media, which bring with them a whole new set of concepts, including creative collage, sampling, remixing, and media piracy. In Chapter 5, for example, Richard Schur explores the work of artists DJ Danger Mouse and Kanye West as a way to celebrate the collaborative culture and “ethical code” of hip hop, and to illustrate the ways academia perceives similar standards for authenticity and documentation. Schur argues that such examples of sampling in popular culture can help us better understand the creativity and integrity involved in utilizing outside sources.
Likewise, taking a progressive stance in the field to resist the traditional notion of writing as the work of an author operating inside of a bubble of unique ideas, Martine Courant Rife and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss argue in Chapter 6 that composing should instead be perceived and taught as “remixing.” This term recognizes the innovation of technology, which encourages authors to construct new meaning by assembling pieces that are often derived from others’ work. This concept of “writing-as-remix,” the authors argue, should inspire us to embrace and complicate the conversation around an “ethic of Fair Use.”
These essays discuss some of the ways the digital age has raised the stakes. In some ways, it seems, it is easier to plagiarize; in other ways, it is also both harder and easier to spot and identify. What some scholars and cultural critics view as a “culture of cheating” (Callahan xvi) has created an academic culture of suspicion and surveillance, as demonstrated by the development (and increasing popularity) of plagiarism detection software. Such a climate, in which the focus is on policing plagiarism rather than teaching and supporting students as they learn conventions of attribution and citation, is counterproductive. In Chapter 7, Deborah Harris-Moore draws from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to highlight the ways plagiarism detection software can be used by administrators and teachers to abuse their power over students. It is important to consider here the complexities of teacher authority and power in the composition classroom, especially in contrast to other classroom settings. How should we define the culture of the composition classroom? What effect does an adversarial relationship between teacher and student have on that culture?
In a similar vein, but for different reasons, Sean Zwagerman argues in Chapter 8 that enforcing anti-plagiarism policies through surveillance and punishment creates hostile divisions between students and teachers and even between those students who do plagiarize and those who don’t. These divisions can have negative effects particularly in the composition classroom, which relies on a collaborative, cooperative environment between teacher and student. Zwagerman explains that both students and teachers are sometimes oversensitive to evaluation; students sometimes plagiarize to avoid bad evaluation, and teachers sometimes deal with such plagiarism unproductively, also to avoid negative teaching evaluations. Zwagerman believes plagiarism policies reliant on surveillance and punishment exacerbate these divisions, and he calls for more collaborative policies that might heal unproductive rifts.
Part III. Authorship and Ownership: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Ultimately, plagiarism is a cultural concept. In a digital, multicultural, and global context, then, cultural and cross-cultural perspectives on authorship and ownership merit exploration. Thus, we begin the final section with Bridget M. Marshall’s “Who Cares About Plagiarism? Cheating and Consequences in the Pop Culture Classroom,” an examination of portrayals of plagiarism and cheating in American popular culture. Using specific examples from television, literature, and film, such as Harry Potter and South Park, and comparing/contrasting these with examples of other media, Marshall reveals the mixed messages sent by pop culture about what constitutes “cheating.” Indeed, students and teachers live in a daily barrage of media references from pop culture, and these references help shape not only the content of our compositions but also our relationships to those texts. Marshall’s chapter offers us a meeting place and an entryway into deeper discussions about the power and responsibility of popular culture in depicting and defining plagiarism.
Marshall’s essay also provides a useful contrast to the discussions of authorship, ownership, and “cheating” that follow. Because first-year composition often offers students their only (or at least primary) instruction on the ethics of ownership in academic culture, composition teachers are routinely expected to behave as gatekeepers, stemming the flow of dishonesty and confusion about plagiarism; as gatekeepers these instructors are expected to not only be aware of cultural differences in their first-year students but also to understand these differences sufficiently to provide clear instruction for preventing any kind of “cheating” in college. In Chapter 10, Rachel Knaizer highlights the overlapping and often conflicting cultural understandings of plagiarism that exist in any one classroom, and shows how those overlaps can confuse students about the nature of plagiarism, especially as students don’t get their information about plagiarism solely from teachers but also from one another. She explains that writers from different countries are especially at risk for being misidentified as plagiarists due to their cultures’ different understandings of language and ownership.
Lise Buranen, in Chapter 11, discusses how various cultures define concepts related to plagiarism and the ownership of language. Based on the results of her own qualitative study, Buranen argues that much of the literature about cross-cultural understandings of plagiarism has resulted in oversimplified maxims for the classroom. Such maxims put all students at risk of believing they don’t understand the rules simply through some fault of their own rather than as a result of complex influences embedded in their individual cultures. Anne-Marie Pederson likewise complicates ideas about plagiarism in Chapter 12 by explaining some of the cultural contexts that contribute to misunderstandings about what constitutes plagiarism and why some people do plagiarize. She explains how Western ideas about property ownership tie to common ideas about plagiarism, and then explains how material conditions and educational experiences facilitate the practice of plagiarism in some cases.
All of these ideas—cross-cultural, popular, academic—provide fertile ground for discussion and, taken together, they present contrasts that are important to examine. Rather than offer a simplistic definition and a guide to avoiding plagiarism, this volume is intended to help students and teachers alike think critically about the very concept itself, and to participate in serious intellectual inquiry and discussion. It is the contention of the editors of this collection that all of us be aware of and understand in a deep way the controversies about plagiarism that writers continually negotiate. All writers, for example, must confront the “problem” that we all owe an enormous debt to those who have come before us, and to our contemporaries, for feeding and shaping our own ideas. All writers struggle to understand what plagiarism really is. Are all ideas plagiarized? Is there really such a thing as true originality? How do we deal with information overload versus our responsibility to document the writers and thinkers already published? Critical Conversations About Plagiarism opens these questions for a collaborative exploration of their meaning and implications in our increasingly complex academic lives.
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