Culture and Academic Discourse: Cultivating Authority in Language and Text

Keynote Address

Texas A&M University

Academic Integrity Week

16 April 2004

Rebecca Moore Howard

Over twenty years ago, Peter Elbow published an article in College English that has profoundly affected my life as a practitioner of composition and rhetoric. The article, "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process," was the forerunner of a book published by Elbow three years later, titled Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. In both the article and the book, Elbow describes the contrary teacherly impulses to help students learn, and to maintain academic standards: "[W]e have an obligation to students but we also have an obligation to knowledge and society." A teacher, Elbow argues, is not "complete" without a commitment to both (327). Yet good teachers, Elbow continues, tend toward one pole or the other. In his evaluation, those who try to strike a balance are not the best teachers (333). Still, he says, "it is possible to make peace between opposites by alternating between them so that you are never trying to do contrary things at any one moment. One opposite leads naturally to the other; indeed, extremity in one enhances extremity in the other in a positive, reinforcing fashion" (334).

Elbow's notion of the contraries of writing helps me interpret and act on the very different approaches to and interpretations of plagiarism that are now in the academic water. Seen through the lens of Elbow's argument, familiar approaches to plagiarism would cluster into two teacherly "contraries": the desire to teach students how to avoid plagiarism, and the desire to protect the standards of the academy from the transgressions of plagiarists.

At first glance, these might seem to be complementary efforts of a single goal. After all, can't a person reasonably teach students to avoid plagiarism and also insist on academic standards, without experiencing any conflict? So we enact honor codes that communicate the academy's expectations for textual work and that provide a means of enforcing those expectations; we purchase plagiarism-detecting software that will facilitate the policing function that is a necessary adjunct of textual regulations; and we devote class time to teaching students how and when to cite sources. Where could be the conflicts in that?

The conflicts come in the actual teaching. I'd like to take you to a slide that I showed faculty from twenty Northeastern colleges at a seminar earlier this spring.

<http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Papers/Bowdoin2004/Patchwriting.htm>.

This sample is not from a downloaded term paper; those are easy--no conflicts. Nor is this sample from a student who was cutting and pasting from the Internet. Even that might seem simple, compared to what was actually going on in my classroom.

This writing sample was part of a paper submitted to me in 1986, my third year in the professoriate. I was teaching a course in Western cultures at Colgate University, and one third of the students in my class--nine out of twenty-seven--plagiarized an assigned paper.

This sample is absolutely typical of what the nine plagiarists were doing. This writer is using deletion, synonymy (substitution), and changes in grammar to reproduce Davidson's text. She deletes Davidson's adjective phrase certain all-important and employs synonymy in changing Davidson's rituals to ceremonies. Grammatical changes appear in the switch from the singular word to words and in the change from the passive are accompanied by to the active which accompanied.

This example is typical of the nine plagiarized papers. When recapitulating the source material, these writers "borrowed" phrases, patched together into "new" sentences; they "borrowed" whole sentences, deleting what they consider irrelevant words and phrases; and they "borrowed" a hodgepodge of phrases and sentences in which they changed grammar and syntax, and substituted synonyms straight from Roget's. Some provided citations, attributing the source; others did not. None of them used quotation marks to indicate which phrases had been appropriated. I've developed the term patchwriting to describe this variety of writing from sources: "Copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes" ("Plagiarism Pentimento" 233).

I gave them all "F's" on the paper; spent an entire class period lecturing on the rules for citing and quoting; and gave the plagiarists the opportunity to revise and resubmit the paper for as better grade. All nine did--and two of them still had patchwriting in their revisions.

What I've learned from that experience is that learning to write from sources is not a matter of receiving the transmission of rules and conventions. It's a matter of deep immersion in text, being able to talk about complex ideas in one's own language. For our undergraduate students, nearly every class is an encounter with whole new fields of discourse. Little wonder that they might struggle for ways to insert themselves into that discourse, searching for language other than that of the text. These struggles evidence themselves in patchwriting, where the student is in a monologic relationship to a text, struggling (often unsuccessfully) to talk about the ideas of the text in any language but that of the text.

These struggles can evidence themselves, too, in cut-and-paste plagiarism from the Internet. In 1998, as Director of Composition at TCU, I stood on the front line of plagiarism adjudication. My department had been experiencing what it considered to be widespread plagiarism, and my job was to take a tough line in adjudicating cases. I did. I took the "contrary" that Elbow describes, protecting the English curriculum and its textual standards. But I did not do so without problems. I remember very clearly an interview with an Asian student about 70% of whose paper consisted of cut-and-paste plagiarism from the Web. Her instructor had heatedly informed me that he had spent serious class time going over the nuances of the departmental policy on plagiarism; that this woman had been in class that day; and that when he asked for questions or problems, she had raised none. Now she was in my office, charged with plagiarism.

"Did you understand what your instructor explained that day?" I asked, wondering to myself whether, as a non-native speaker of English, she had difficulties in listening comprehension.

"Yes," she told me, "I understood."

"Then why did you do it?"

She began to cry quietly. "Because if I had put quotation marks around all those paragraphs, I would have gotten an 'F.'"

And I began to fear I understood what was going on. "Why didn't you say these things in your own words?" I asked, knowing now what the answer would be.

"I couldn't! How could I say these things in other ways?"

"So you copied, and took the chance that you wouldn't be caught?"

"Yes," she answered, still crying.

I told her that I understood and that I sympathized. I told her that when she was in such a situation, she had to work closely with her instructor and with the Writing Center, so that she could accomplish this difficult task. And I told her that I was supporting the instructor's decision to give her an "F."

No contraries. As an administrator, I made that decision with no difficulty; my path was clear to me. I was on the front lines in the fight against a culture of plagiarism among TCU students, and believe me, after a couple semesters' work, that culture was disappearing fast. Word gets around.

Which of course is the guiding principle behind plagiarism-detecting software. Students know you use it, so they are afraid to cheat. No contraries. Fear will make students do their own work, or learn how to do their own work. Here it is in the words of the Turnitin.com website:

Turnitin.com created Resource Resources because we believe preemptive education is the most effective way to prevent plagiarism. We also know some students will plagiarize regardless. If you are an educator and have used plagiarism education preemptively in your classroom, but still suspect many of your students are plagiarizing, automated plagiarism detection can be an enormously effective deterrent. Click here if you would like to find out more about Turnitin.com's plagiarism prevention system and other online learning tools. ("Plagiarism and the Internet")

But life is never this simple. Consider, for example, the case of Richard Judd, who has just stepped down as president of Central Connecticut State University. His health, he says, compelled him to retire ("University President"). But his health was clearly affected by the media reports that he had plagiarized about 50% of a newspaper opinion piece. "Ah," you may be saying, "He couldn't possibly continue as college president after that was made public." Well, the faculty of his college would disagree; they voted that Judd should keep his job ("College President"). Contraries? Are those people in Connecticut crazy? How can they hold their students to high textual standards that they don't expect of the college president?

Thus far in this presentation I've raised just a few of the contraries of textual education. First, there's the case of students in my course at Colgate University, students who simply couldn't write in a language other than that of the text they were reading. These are students at one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. They are neither lazy, stupid, nor indifferent. They want to do well, and in this case they perfectly well understood the guidelines for citing sources and avoiding plagiarism. And they were incapable of following those guidelines, because they were unfamiliar with the discourse of the text.

Second, there's the case of the Asian woman at Texas Christian, the one who perfectly well understood the guidelines for citing sources and avoiding plagiarism and who nevertheless copied big chunks of text from the Internet, even though she knew she was plagiarizing and that it was wrong, because she didn't have the linguistic resources for talking about those texts in her own words.

Third, there's the case of the Central Connecticut State faculty who voted for their president to remain in office after it had been discovered that he had copied 50% of a newspaper opinion piece. If their actions seem outrageous to you, consider that in 2002, historian Eugene Tobin resigned the presidency of Hamilton College in New York after having plagiarized part of his convocation address from Amazon.com reader reviews of books. And even as the chair of the Board of Trustees accepted his resignation, a university spokesman said, "I think people were both surprised and concerned. . . . But most people who know President Tobin recognize him as a person of high integrity and recognize this was an unintentional error" (Margulies). Copying from Amazon.com reader reviews and representing them as your own reading of books is unintentional? That's ridiculous. But the issue does cloud when we read the statements made by students and faculty at a pro-Tobin rally after his resignation. According to the Utica Observer-Dispatch, Anthropology Professor Bonnie Urciuoli made a "passionate speech" in which she declared,

"I want to make a distinction between appropriating phrases that sound pretty and appropriating information. . . . Plagiarism is when you take someone else's information and pass it off as yours in something published, or in a class paper. It is not what happened here.

"I don't give a damn if people think that I don't understand what the honor of Hamilton College is all about," Urciuoli continued, to prolonged cheers and thunderous applause. "When you have someone who's willing to knock themselves out, morning, noon and night, day after day ... and you understand what the communicative parts of his job consist of, you can see it in a context that you wouldn't have otherwise." (Le)

These are contraries. They pull at the seams of our neat representations of plagiarism. Academic honor codes inevitably draw {supposedly} clear lines of right and wrong. Plagiarism-detecting softwares are mechanized and therefore {supposedly} foolproof: one either has or has not plagiarized, and there's the software program to verify the fact.

But get in the classroom, start paying attention to the actual human beings you find there, and honor codes and softwares are of very little help. Learning how to write from sources is a complex, difficult task fraught with overlapping trails of intertextuality, originality, citation, and appropriation. Transgressing against textual standards is inevitable in the career of any writer. It seems to happen frequently among historians--I'm thinking here not just of Eugene Tobin but also Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin--and that is probably not incidental to the fact that historians work almost exclusively from texts. Empirical linguist Diane Pecorari has studied the work of seventeen international students in master's and doctoral programs in three British universities, reading not only their dissertations but the sources from which they were working. She observes that sixteen of the seventeen writers "had one or more passages in their writing samples in which 50% or more of the words came from their sources without being indicated as quotation" (325). These were advanced academic writers, enthusiastic and knowledgeable about their topic. As researcher, Pecorari could find no evidence that they intended to plagiarize (334-335); rather, she concluded that they were engaging in what she classified as a form of patchwriting, "a form of textual plagiarism which is caused not by the intention to deceive but by the need for further growth as a writer" (338).

How plagiarism is punished depends in great part on the context of the occurrence and the ethos of the transgressor. And punishments, despite the desires of people like Thomas Mallon, are seldom uniform--not because our culture can't get its act together nor because some people are soft on plagiarism and others hard, but because plagiarism is always a relational, contextual act. Consider, for example, the perspective of Richard A. Posner, Judge of the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, commenting on the plagiarisms of disgraced New York Times journalist Jayson Blair:

Journalists (like politicians) have a bad reputation for truthfulness, and historians, in this "postmodernist" era, are suspected of having embraced an extreme form of relativism and of having lost their regard for facts. Both groups hope by taking a very hard line against plagiarism and fabrication to reassure the public that they are serious diggers after truth whose efforts, a form of "sweat equity," deserve protection against copycats.

Their anxieties are understandable; but the rest of us will do well to keep the matter in perspective, realizing that the term "plagiarism" is used loosely and often too broadly; that much plagiarism is harmless and (when the term is defined broadly) that some has social value.

Contraries? You betcha. It is my firm belief that, to act responsibly as a classroom teacher, I must teach (1) conventions of citation; (2) the importance of citation; and (3) the problems of plagiarism. But I must also teach (4) methods of critical reading, so that students have practice in engaging the language of unfamiliar texts in unfamiliar discourse. And I must also (5) engage all these issues in a dialogic, pedagogical way, so that my students are not only able but willing to talk with me about their difficulties in working from texts, without fear of punishment. I've learned, over the years, how to sit down with a student and say, "Tell me about the production of this paper. It sounds to me like I'm hearing your voice in some places and other people's voices in others. Tell me about how you wrote this paper, so that we can consider together how it might be revised so that you're speaking with your own voice and authority, and marking where you're drawing in the voices of others." Notice the language of this engagement with students. It's not an effort to ferret out the plagiarist; rather, it assumes that plagiarism has taken place and addresses that not as a crime to be punished but rather as a learning issue to be addressed. And every single time I take up the matter this way, the student has talked very frankly and even gratefully, and we have worked--in class, in conferences, or through the Writing Center--to bring the paper within the academic fold and to increase the student's ability to produce such work.

I should point out that in advocating this approach, I'm not including downloaded term papers. No contraries there: the student downloads, the student dies. Oh, okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, but I hope I'm making my point. The problem is that, through media coverage and through aggressive marketing of Turnitin.com, we've all come to fear the specter of Internet plagiarism, and we're overdetermining our pedagogy so that we're erasing attention to the contextualized, relational phenomena that characterize the vast majority of students' textual transgressions. It's not fear that will motivate these students to change; quite the contrary, it's trust. Our students need to trust that our primary motivation is to teach them, and they need to trust that we will not criminalize their transitional efforts to learn. They need to know that if they turn in a paper that somebody else wrote, they will risk a very unpleasant punishment. But they also need to know that, as they work to weave source language with their own, whether on the level of the sentence or the paragraph, that their teachers are ready to help them practice and improve their skills. It is in this spirit that the national Council of Writing Program Administrators offers its "Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices," which says,

Ethical writers make every effort to acknowledge sources fully and appropriately in accordance with the contexts and genres of their writing. A student who attempts (even if clumsily) to identify and credit his or her source, but who misuses a specific citation format or incorrectly uses quotation marks or other forms of identifying material taken from other sources, has not plagiarized. Instead, such a student should be considered to have failed to cite and document sources appropriately. (2)

This amounts to a teaching mandate, one that becomes most compelling when we are teaching students whose native language is not English and who can therefore be expected to have acute problems in reproducing esoteric ideas in language that not only does not derive directly from the text but that is not even the home language of the student writer. That need is exacerbated if the student comes from a culture in which writers are expected to reproduce extended strings of unattributed language from authoritative sources. Rhetorician Carolyn Matalene describes what she learned when she taught in China: the audience is expected to "infer meanings" (801), because Chinese rhetoric proceeds by indirection (802). Matalene explains, "The most acute disagreement and misunderstanding that occurred between me and my wonderfully quick and highly motivated Chinese students was over [the] issue [of plagiarism]." Imitation is considered essential in Chinese rhetoric, "especially" (in the words of a Matalene student) "for a beginner" (803).

But even this is an oversimplification, as the more recent work of Australian critical linguist Alastair Pennycook demonstrates. Teaching in China, Pennycook, like Matalene, discovers that his students have memorized substantial passages of text that they deploy, unattributed, in their writing (201-202). Pennycook takes this not just as a matter of cross-cultural differences in textual standards but as a larger matter of how all writers interact with texts. In other words, he learns from the international classroom not how rhetorics vary from one culture to another, but rather what the rhetoric of a non-Western culture can suggest about how all writers work. "Because all language learning," Pennycook says, "is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable?" (202). Working from this question, he recommends that we explore the possibilities for an internationalized notion of ownership and authorship (203). And that internationalized notion of ownership and authorship would revise our thinking about plagiarism: "An understanding of the notion of authorship and originality as a very particular cultural and historical orientation to meaning raises profound questions about plagiarism" (211). One of these, Pennycook says, is the paradox of scholars who prosecute students' plagiarism while defending the borrowings of canonized authors such as Coleridge (212)--or, I would add, those of college presidents Eugene Tobin and Richard Judd. Considering the case in which the University of Oregon copied the plagiarism policy of Stanford University (212-213), Pennycook muses, "[I]n the same way that Western literary practices centre around the notion of the individual creator and yet constantly echo the lines of others, academic work also stresses the individual, creative thinker and writer and yet constantly emphasizes a fixed canon of disciplinary knowledge." He also points out the textual privileges that academics claim, while denying the same to their students (213).

I raise all this as a way of exploring what are, truly, the contraries of teaching writing from sources. Our task will not be simplified by honor codes or plagiarism-detecting softwares. Text-based writing is not a reflex of morality or property but a complex intellectual skill. "Learning a skill," Diane Pecorari says, "is rarely a straight line from input to mastery" (320). If we are true to our charge to teach and not just to frighten, catch, and punish, then we must, in Peter Elbow's words, be willing to embrace the contraries of textuality. We must universalize neither the terms of plagiarism nor the actions of our students but instead engage the real, individual learners in our classrooms, people who trust us to teach them.

Works Cited

"College President Cited for Plagiarism." MSNBC News 17 March 2004. <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4551042/>. Accessed 18 March 2004.

Council of Writing Program Administrators. "Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: WPA Statement on Best Policies." Council of Writing Program Administrators, January 2003. <http://www.ilstu.edu/~ddhesse/wpa/>.

Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Elbow, Peter. "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process." College English 45.4 (April 1983): 327-39.

Le, Cecilia. "Hamilton Rally Supports Tobin." Utica (New York) Observer-Dispatch 3 October 2002. <http://www.uticaod.com/archive/2002/10/03/news/6865.html>. Accessed 22 March 2004.

Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989, 2001.

Margulies, Jonathan. "President of Hamilton College, in N.Y., Apologizes for Failing to Cite Sources in Speech." The Chronicle of Higher Education (25 September 2002). <http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/09/2002092505n.htm>. Accessed 28 September 2002.

Matalene, Carolyn. "Contrastive Rhetoric: An American Writing Teacher in China." College English 47.8 (December 1985): 789-808.

Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003): 317-345.

Pennycook, Alastair. "Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism." TESOL Quarterly 30 (1996): 201-230.

"Plagiarism and the Internet." Turnitin.com. <http://www.plagiarism.org/research_site/e_what_is_plagiarism.html >. Accessed 17 July 2003.

Posner, Richard A. "The Truth about Plagiarism." New York Newsday 18 May 2003. <http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppos183290081may18,0,7059434.story>. Accessed 21 May 2003.

"University President Retires Amid Plagiarism Allegations." Fox News Channel 19 March 2004. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,114705,00.html>. Accessed 20 March 2004.