Mapping the Territory of Plagiarism[1]
Washington State University
11 May 2004
Rebecca Moore Howard
I'll begin today with what is for me an oft-told tale: my first teacherly encounter with plagiarism http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Papers/Bowdoin2004/Patchwriting.htm. 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).
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.
Learning how to write from sources is a complex, difficult task fraught with overlapping trails of intertextuality, originality, citation, and appropriation. Learning how to teach students to write from sources is no less complex. Just as every writer is always struggling in the slippery territory of originality, intertextuality, and plagiarism, so every teacher is always wrestling with the map of students' textuality, trying to figure out where her students are, how they got there, and how she can keep them on--I'll continue with my metaphor and call it the Interstate highways of textuality (distinct from the dirt roads of plagiarism). Hence I am intrigued to find an actual map of plagiarism on the WSU website: http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/electric/trainingmods/plagiarism_test/teaching4.html. According to this table, teachers can mathematically calculate the severity of students' textual infractions. I'll be very appreciative if those of you who use this table let me know how helpful you find it. I've never been able to devise or discover any way of quantifying plagiarism. Each case is too relational, too situated. But if this taxonomic, tabulated approach proves useful, it could guide us toward something more helpful than the universalizing definitions that characterize academic integrity codes, including that of Washington State:
Plagiarism is knowingly representing the work of another as oneÕs own, without proper acknowledgment of the source. The only exceptions to the requirement that sources be acknowledged occur when the information, ideas, etc., are common knowledge. Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, submitting as oneÕs own work the work of a 'ghost writer' or work obtained from a commercial writing service; quoting directly or paraphrasing closely from a source without giving proper credit; using figures, graphs, charts, or other such material without identifying the source. http://www.studentaffairs.wsu.edu/students/handbook/conductStandards.asp?i=1&menu=10&subMenu=1
All of us, I think, want such definitions to be useful. Two prominent plagiarism scholars, Donald L. McCabe and Gary Pavela, believe that institutions can and should institute "clear and consistent definitions of academic dishonesty" (36). If we can only devise a simple, clear definition; agree upon it; and adhere to it--then (maybe) we'll be able to solve this plagiarism problem. So we keep struggling to produce these definitions, and WSU's is not much different from--and is just as good as--any other.
And just as useless. First of all, such definitions necessarily elide the extent to which the advanced, nuanced textual skills demanded by plagiarism policies are acquired with great difficulty and are always a continuing challenge for every writer. The less experienced the writer, the more likely he or she is to plagiarize. Yet no writer is always on the sanctioned side of textual activity. (Only at the last minute, as I prepared this address and posted it to my website, did I remember to insert a footnote acknowledging that passages in it were adapted from an earlier address that I gave at Texas A&M!)
Second, these universalizing definitions assume that the transmission and reception of the Laws of Textuality--citation, quotation, and a respect for the property of others--are sufficient. Once a writer has received this information, so the logic goes, he or she should observe its dictates; and if the writer then transgresses, he or she has earned punishment. My students at Colgate demonstrated to me how wrong was this logic: I gave all nine patchwriters "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! They simply could not write from the source in any words but its own. These were not stupid or unmotivated students; Colgate is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country, and its students are well-prepared and hard-working.
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 as if 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 ambiguities 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, 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)
Even this, though, fails to capture some of the nuances of students' writing from texts. Let me take you to what is for me some new material: three instances of patchwriting from my sophomore research class this semester. All derive from an assignment to write an annotated bibliography of twelve peer-reviewed scholarly sources. The topic of our course was the 2004 Presidential campaign, and each student chose a campaign issue--or an issue they believed the candidates should take up--to research. They learned a lot about searching databases and judging sources as they located their peer-reviewed scholarly sources, and they did a remarkable job of reading and annotating these sources. They complained about the technical language and analyses in some, but they found these sources valuable for their final paper, which was to make a researched argument about how the candidates should be taking up these issues.
Still, their work on the annotated bibliographies was not spotless. One student's annotation contained a one-sentence definition of her key term that was copied almost verbatim from the source she was annotating. I gave her a "C" for the paper, observing in my comments, "[I]n at least one place, patchwriting substitutes for summary."
The annotated bibliography assignment followed some excellent directions provided by the Cornell University Library:
Write a concise annotation that summarizes the central theme and scope of the book or article. Include one or more sentences that (a) evaluate the authority or background of the author, (b) comment on the intended audience, (c) compare or contrast this work with another you have cited, or (d) explain how this work illuminates your bibliography topic. http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm
The injunction to include information about the author or source gave my students fits. How were they, mere lowly undergraduates, to know anything about the authors and sources? "Search the Web!" I responded, and they did. And sure enough, they found background information about their authors and sources. But one student found only a single sentence about his author, and he copied it verbatim from the Web without attribution. How could he say differently information that was contained in only a single sentence? But how could he quote from another source in a 200-word annotation? I gave him a "C," too, remarking on his paper, "While I see the problem you faced with your source information on the Johnson annotation, you chose the worst solution--patchwriting."
And then there was the student who had trouble locating his sources and thus got behind in the preparatory work for the assignment. After the class generated their working bibliographies, I required them to write summaries of those sources. Then they were to write their annotations by condensing their summaries. But this student, working behind the eight-ball, didn't do his preparatory summaries. He wrote the annotations directly from his sources, and one of his annotations copied a sentence not from the source but from the abstract of the source. I gave him an "F," writing on his paper, "I quit reading at p. 4, when I discovered that your summary copied from the article's own abstract." He dropped by my office to pick up his paper, and as he rushed off, I said, "You're going to want to talk with me about this one," knowing that he would, indeed, come see me.
He did; he was there for my next office hours, worried that I thought he was a reprehensible human being. "No," I said. "You made a bad decision, though." He wanted to know if there was anything he could do to make up for the "F," and I said, "No, you have to 'eat' that grade." He was quiet for a minute. "Are you okay with that?" I asked. "Well," he said, "it was just one sentence." So I told him about the other two patchwritings on the assignment. I told him that I gave those writers "C"s, not "F"s, because they copied from the source, whereas he'd deliberately drawn from somebody else's summary of the source as if it were his own. That's over a line, I explained: the other two cases were bad writing, whereas his was fraudulent writing, even if only a single sentence. He saw the difference--and went to work to make an "A" on his next paper.
Did I make the right decisions in these three cases? Well, I made the best decisions I could. Five years from now, I may have figured out a better way to respond, but this is the best I have now.
The most important thing, though, is that these three incidents in my most recent class will revise my pedagogy. I'll spend more time teaching techniques for writing from sources; my undergraduates need it. My purpose here is not to prevent my students from plagiarizing, but to develop their textual skills so that they can write from texts without patchwriting. Patchwriting is seldom an issue of fraud, hence seldom an issue of plagiarism. And it is something that all of us do; it's just that more experienced writers patchwrite seamlessly and invisibly.
Hence I am unperturbed by having three sophomores patchwrite, even though one of those cases was fraudulent. I take plagiarism and patchwriting very seriously, but I am seldom upset by it, because I expect it. For some teachers, the expectation that students will plagiarize is a source of anguish. A Canadian journalist reports that teachers in that country are moving away from assigning out-of-class papers, instead giving only in-class assignments, so that students cannot plagiarize (Schmidt). And in that na•ve, wrong-headed response to the specter of plagiarism, students learn even less about writing from sources.
I'd like to invoke poets, journalists, theorists, jurists, and researchers in support of my claim that the line between intertextuality and plagiarism is always blurred, impossible to patrol. Writing in College Composition and Communication, Margaret Price says that plagiarism policies should not reinforce the notions of authorship and ownership of text (93) but should instead acknowledge these notions as a "site of discussion" (97). T.S. Eliot had something of this in mind when he made the audacious statement,
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. (143)
What Eliot suggests is that both good and bad writers work on the same continuum of plagiarism and intertextuality, and he emphasizes that expert writers make something new of their appropriations.
Somewhat more recently, Richard Posner, Judge of the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, notes that plagiarism includes the element of deception; although West Side Story is adapted from Romeo and Juliet, it doesn't intend to hide that fact and thus cannot be called a plagiarism ("Plagiarism"). In a separate publication, Posner specifies intent as a necessary part of adjudicating plagiarism:
It would be better if the term "plagiarism" were confined to literal copying, and moreover literal copying that is not merely unacknowledged but deceptive. Failing to give credit where credit is due should be regarded as a lesser, indeed usually merely venial, offense. ("Truth")
David Edelstein, writing for Slate, notes how easily almost any writer can, under sufficient duress, succumb to intentional plagiarism:
It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, "How can I fill this hole?" knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.
Finally, what for me is a stunning piece of research: in the latest issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing, empirical linguist Diane Pecorari reports her research on the work of seventeen international students in master's and doctoral programs in three British universities. Pecorari studied not only the writers' dissertations but also 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).
Let me summarize the authoritative sources from which I'm quoting here: everybody appropriates from source texts; experienced writers do so seamlessly, making fresh arguments from their appropriations. People shouldn't be punished for plagiarism unless they intended to deceive, and plagiarism policies should acknowledge that the map of the territory of plagiarism is redrawn with each journey--rather like the moving staircases in Harry Potter's dormitory.
And let me conclude with some recommendations about what teachers can and should do:
1. We should take our students' writing seriously and treat it respectfully.
2. We should recognize that what may look like an unethical appropriation from a source may in fact be an unsuccessful attempt to write responsibly--unsuccessful either because the writers doesn't fully understand the conventions of citation and quotation or (much more often) doesn't understand the source well enough to write from it in fresh language.
3. We should take a punitive stance toward students' attempts to represent someone else's writing as their own--whether their appropriations are downloading an entire term paper, or whether those appropriations involve copying a single sentence from a journal abstract into one's own annotation of the source.
4. Even then, however, a universalized response will not do. Copying a single sentence from an abstract can represent a brief episode of falling over the line on which every writer dances. On the other hand, buying a term paper or having one ghostwritten amounts to a premeditated murder of the possibilities for learning. They do not warrant equal punishment. I have not yet had the experience of discovering that one of my students submitted a paper written by another; but if and when I do, I will pursue an "F" for the course.
5. We should take our teaching seriously, which for me means crafting our materials to maximize the possibility of students' caring about what they are learning. When the course is just an obstacle to a career goal, it will be dispatched by the most expeditious means possible. And behold, downloaded term papers will abound in great number. But when the course is something that students feel committed to and involved in, the incidents of plagiarism will usually be limited to the citation errors and patchwriting that characterize the work of earnest, developing writers and scholars.
Back in the 80s, there was a popular bumper sticker that said, "Shit happens." I wish I had a bumper sticker that said, "Plagiarism happens." The question is not whether it happens, but whether we teachers can be intelligent and nuanced in understanding what it means when it happens; whether we can respond appropriately and deliberately rather than hysterically; and whether we can remain dedicated to helping our students become better, more successful writers.
Edelstein, David. "Stephen's Bogus Journey." Slate 30 October 2003. <http://slate.msn.com/id/2090544/>.
Eliot, T.S. "Philip Massinger." Essays on Elizabethan Drama. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. 141-161.
"How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography." Olin and Uris Libraries, Cornell University. 20 November 2002. <http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm>.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Culture and Academic Discourse: Cultivating Authority in Language and Text." Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 16 April 2004. <http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Papers/TAMU.htm>.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "A Plagiarism Pentimento." Journal of Teaching Writing 11.3 (Summer 1993): 233-46.
McCabe, Donald L., and Gary Pavela. "Some Good News about Academic Integrity." Change 32.5 (2000): 32-38.
Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003): 317-345.
Posner, Richard. "On Plagiarism." Atlantic Monthly (April 2002): 23.
Posner, Richard A. "The Truth about Plagiarism." New York Newsday 18 May 2003. <http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppos183290081may18,0,7059434.story>.
Price, Margaret. "Beyond 'Gotcha!': Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (September 2002): 88-115.
Schmidt, Sarah. "Term Papers Axed to Obliterate Plagiarism." Calgary (Canada) Herald 31 March 2004. <http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=849ee48c-7aae-4551-9cc9-7ad274743c4c>.
[1] Portions of this address are adapted from a presentation to the faculty of Texas A&M University on 16 April 2004.