Plagiarism and Researched Writing:
Contemporary Concerns, Future Issues
Wellesley College
14 May 2004
Rebecca Moore Howard
I've just finished a semester in which I taught a sophomore course required of Syracuse students, a course in researched writing. I chose to focus my section on the Presidential primary, asking my students to analyze media coverage and candidates' rhetoric and to develop expertise on one campaign issue. For me--and, I think, for most of my students--it was an invigorating experience. We all learned a lot about the political process and the role of the media; about the candidates themselves; and about a variety of issues, including school vouchers, equal rights for marriage, missile defense, and outsourcing. My students learned how to locate and read scholarly peer-reviewed sources; they learned techniques for conducting open source and database searches; they became good evaluators of the reliability and authority of sources; and they learned how to assemble annotated bibliographies. By the end of the semester, they had become so confident of their knowledge of their chosen campaign issues that they wrote pretty good research papers with relative ease. A second-year architecture student who at the beginning of the semester had been writing crabbed, strangled prose spoke eloquently on the centrality of Iran to U.S. interests in the Middle East, and a management major who began the semester comfortable only with writing down facts, free of his own opinion, wrote extensively on the salutary economic effects of outsourcing.
Writing 205, Spring 2004, was for me once again a rewarding experience in teaching. I believe that my students gained expertise and confidence in writing practices that they will use in their academic and professional careers, and I know that I enjoyed talking with, working with, and learning from them. I now know, from the student writing about broadband access, what a "Google Time Bomb" is! Next year my teaching responsibilities don't include Writing 205, and I regret that; it's one of my favorite courses, in part because I believe it is such an important course.
Others agree with me about the importance of sustained college instruction in research. The 2003 document Standards for Success, issued by the Center for Educational Policy Research, acknowledges that research involves critical evaluation of sources; understanding of the differences between primary and secondary sources; and facility with synthesizing sources (19). Composition and rhetoric scholar David Bleich waxes eloquent on the topic: instruction in research, he saysm, teaches students "how to discover what people already know, what it means to find things out to begin with, and how to bring what they learned to public notice" (27). And in an essay in the journal College Composition and Communication, Bruce Petersen and Jill Burkland assert that research can be regarded broadly "as a way of thinking about reading, writing, and our experience of all texts" (236).
So much for the joys of teaching research writing. What we're hearing about today, from all quarters, is the perils of the genre. First of all, we can no longer get our students in the library. Instead, they find all their information on the Internet. Second, they are indiscriminate about what they find on the Internet; they can't tell the difference between a scholarly source and a commercial one. And they don't care about learning that difference, either. Third, they are uncritical about online sources, never asking about the ethos of the author, the credibility of the publisher, or the validity of the evidence. All the evaluative criteria that mean so much in the print world fall by the digital wayside.
And then there's the little matter of plagiarism, that toe-tapping topic that brings me to Wellesley today. Let me quote the New York Daily News from last December: "In numbers growing by the thousands, students have found a quick-fix cure for their academic headachesÑon the Internet. In the wonderful world of Web sites, scores of online companies are eager and able to provide slackers with whatever they needÑfor a price" (Kates).
In frustration, many teachers are throwing up their hands, giving up on research assignments. "It doesn't work anymore; there are too many barriers." "Students seem incapable of going to the library, incapable of being discriminating about and critical of their sources." No matter how hard we try to teach them, we seem to fail.
Meanwhile, in small voices, we admit that we teachers know less about the Internet than our students do. How can we catch up, what with our teaching loads, our research expectations, our committee work? And how can we command our students' respect on a topic that they know more about?
So we go out and do really stupid things. We subscribe to plagiarism-checking software and websites, in the erroneous trust that they will patrol our students' ethics. Or we go so far as to quit assigning out-of-class writing altogether. The Calgary Herald, a Canadian newspaper, reports that college faculty in that country are moving toward assigning only in-class writing as a way of deterring plagiarism. The journalist filing this report notes the dangers of this trend: "[T]he move away from the traditional essay by some profs to counter [widespread plagiarism] comes just as administrators openly complain about the writing skills of students" (Schmidt). And meanwhile, the emergence of a timed, one-shot writing performance on the new SAT test is prompting education analysts to speculate that research writing instruction in high schools will quickly diminish, replaced by practice in timed, one-shot writing performances (Winerip).
It's our job, I believe, to save research writing as a viable mode of instruction. If we allow it to drop out of the academic world, we lose an incomparable venue for teaching critical thinking and critical inquiry. We fail to equip the scholars of tomorrow with the research tools they will need to conduct their work. And we fail to equip the citizens of today with the tools they need for asking good questions and finding sound answers.
A first step is acknowledging how huge is the task. The tools are at hand: I drafted part of this presentation while sitting in the United terminal at O'Hare. As I looked around, I saw twenty-one people, all adults, in my section. Four were on computers, one had an MP3 payer, and four were on telephones. Two were reading books; one, a newspaper. We may be behind our students, but we adults are now multiliterate, too.
But we have to become a lot smarter than we are about the new literacies. Just because we have cell phones doesn't mean we know how to do text messaging. Just because we can set up a web page doesn't mean we know anything about visual design. And just because we know what a research paper meant when we were in college doesn't mean we know a thing about researching online.
We have to teach ourselves, and we teachers have to persuade our colleagues on the library staff to coach us. They are the experts in information literacy and online research, and they can help instructional staff with the work ahead. But we also have to take the individual responsibility of getting online and starting to work in our college library's website, discovering what databases and journals are there, how one can find information in them, how one can learn about them, and what instructional materials for researchers are provided on our library websites. We have to experiment with the advanced search options in our online library catalogues, in databases available through the library website, and in online search engines. We have to learn about the open-source research sites available on the Web--places such as the Vertical File Index, which catalogs pamphlets and booklets released by government agencies; the American Statistics Index; the OneLook Dictionary Search, the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, the American Memory online visual archive, the Catalist catalog of listservs and newsgroups, Google Image Search, Infomine's index of academic websites, GraphicMaps.com, the Internet Public Library, the Librarians' Index to the Internet, National Center for Education Statistics, and, of all things, the CIA's World Factbook!
Some of you are way ahead of me and already know about all these things and more. Others are thinking it's just not necessary; that research practices are or should be the same, regardless of the venue, and that students need to exercise good strategies and good ethics when they work online. What I've learned from my own fledgling forays into information literacy is how wrong that attitude is. Researching online is different, and not researching online is downright foolish. Yes, we all need to know about how to conduct research in bricks-and-mortar libraries, but far more importantly, we need to know how to find and evaluate information online. How to get started? Again, there's no better place than the library homepage. A second place to go is those writer's handbooks we have our students adopt--you know, The Writer's Reference, the St. Martin's Handbook, the Little, Brown Handbook. They offer really useful introductions to online research. As you actually work your way through their instruction, you'll find many shortcomings; on digital issues, handbooks are out of date before they're even published. But they are valuable introductions, nonetheless.
You may be wondering why I'm going on about the importance of college instruction in research writing and the importance of instructors' acquiring contemporary information literacy. I haven't forgotten that my title today is "Plagiarism and Researched Writing: Contemporary Concerns, Future Issues." It's not that I haven't yet gotten to my topic. On the contrary, I've been talking about it since the beginning. Because it is my firm belief that if instructors are themselves possessed of information literacy and if they teach it to their students, the worst kinds of plagiarism will all but disappear from our classrooms. Let me illustrate from my own sophomore composition class this semester, a class that I taught very differently from the way I have in the past. The difference is that last fall I spent several days in my library website, in writers' handbooks, and online, learning something about what is out there, how to get to it, how to search through it, and how to evaluate the results. In my previous semester's sophomore composition, I had experienced all the common frustrations: I couldn't get my students to go the library. Instead, they found all their information on the Internet. Despite my instruction, they were indiscriminate about what they found on the Internet, unable to tell the difference between a scholarly source and a commercial one. And they didn't care about learning that difference, either. They were uncritical about online sources, never asking about the ethos of the author, the credibility of the publisher, or the validity of the evidence. All the evaluative criteria that mean so much in the print world fell by the digital wayside.
Things were remarkably different this spring, thanks to my newly refurbished information literacy. The first assignment was to evaluate the media coverage of the Presidential primary. I required them to use three weekly newsmagazines and left the choice of other sources up to them. Almost all of them went online and stayed online. Fine. For the second assignment, they analyzed the rhetoric of one candidate. They had to focus on what the candidate himself said, so they went online and found speeches and campaign websites. Fine.
Then came the second half of the semester, when they were to research a campaign issue. We had two assignments. The first was an annotated bibliography of twelve scholarly, peer-reviewed sources. We spent three weeks on the task. First I introduced them to the library databases. Then they delved the databases and developed working bibliographies. Then they chose twelve sources and began reading and summarizing them. Then I introduced them to the concept of annotated bibliographies, and taught them how to condense their summaries into annotations. Then we spent a class period getting their citations into MLA style.
Sounds pretty mundane, doesn't it? It was anything but. There was plenty of anxiety about finding scholarly peer-reviewed sources on their topics, but in class, the students shared information about which databases they were working with, and how useful they found them. One of the things some of them discovered--and taught the rest of us--was that on several of the databases, you can conduct a search that specifies only peer-reviewed sources. The students wondered, too, about why I was putting them through such a rigorous exercise, so I explained the differences between peer-reviewed sources, scholarly sources, and lay sources. There were also plenty of complaints about how technical some of their sources were, so we spent time in class talking about how their annotations would have to acknowledge that they couldn't evaluate all the evidence in the source. And there was a wonderful moment in class: I was showing them advanced database search techniques, and we were trying them out on some of the topics the students had chosen. We did this after they had already tried to find sources, meeting with plenty of frustration. And as they watched what could be accomplished with advanced techniques in the very databases they'd been searching, they fell silent. Finally one raised his hand: "Do other people know about this?" he asked.
Then for their final paper, they wrote a researched argument, at least ten pages long, about why the issue they'd chosen was important for the Presidential campaign, and how the candidates should be taking up that issue. I told them they should draw on any of their scholarly, peer-reviewed sources that were useful, and that they should supplement them with whatever additional sources of whatever type they wanted to bring in.
And the papers they wrote were wonderful. They felt confident of what they were saying; they drew heavily on the scholarly sources, and they based their arguments not from open-source websites but from sources such as the World Policy Journal, the Journal of Management Accounting Research, the Journal of Social Philosophy, and the Journal of Law and Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a Cornell professor found that students used more scholarly, peer-reviewed sources when they were required to do so (Carlson); what I found is that when my students had been compelled to engage scholarly peer-reviewed sources, them came to appreciate and rely on them.
And yes, they plagiarized. But their "plagiarism" was not downloading term papers or copying big chunks of text from the web; it was only patchwriting, in which they leaned too heavily on the language of their sources. It was the kind of "plagiarism" that inexperienced writers do when working with conceptually dense material. And yes, I reduced their grades for patchwriting--not because it's a crime but because it's bad writing. In the annotated bibliography, one student copied a sentence of his annotation from the abstract of his source, and I gave him an "F" on the paper.
These are not the types of plagiarism that we all fear; this is not what drives us to honor codes and Turnitin.com. But these are just about the worst we can expect when we ourselves are possessed of some degree of information literacy; when we share that expertise with our students, step by step, meanwhile learning from them things that we do not know; and when we start with what they do know (open-source Internet searching of commercial websites) and move systematically into territory (the library databases and scholarly journals) that they are unfamiliar with.
Taking them through a careful process is important now and
will be more so in the future.
Reporting the findings of the National Commission on Writing in
America's Schools and Colleges, Tamar Lewin observes,
Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.
And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.
That's not good news for those of use who will be teaching these students when they reach college. And as I mentioned earlier, the new SAT writing test may actually have a deleterious effect: Will Fitzhugh, the founder and publisher of the Concord Review, which publishes high school students' history research writing, fears that a decreasing number of students will be writing research. Instead they'll be practicing the five-paragraph themes required in the new SAT writing tests (Winerip).
The biggest threat to our students' research skills, though, is us--their teachers. We have before us the task of acquiring advanced information literacy; figuring out ways to use it so that our students become discriminating, critical digital citizens; putting digital literacy and print literacy in a productive dialogue; crafting pedagogy that involves our students in these tasks; and mentoring them through the complex practices of multiliterate research. Instead, we are allowing ourselves to fall prey to advertising and media, which lead us to think of our students as criminals who must be contained. Let me read an extended passage from one advertisement. As I read, I urge you to think about how students, writing, and teaching are being represented:
Plagiarism has never been easier than it is today.
Before the Internet, cheating was labor-intensive and obvious. Potential
plagiarists had to find appropriate works from a limited pool of resources,
usually a nearby library, and copy them by hand. Since these resources were
almost always professionally written, the risk of detection was very high.
The Internet now makes it easy to find thousands of
relevant sources in seconds, and in the space of a few minutes plagiarists can
find, copy, and paste together an entire term paper or essay. Because much of
the material online is produced by other students, it is often difficult or
impossible for educators to identify plagiarism based on expectations of
student-level work.
Even when an instructor does suspect plagiarism, the
sheer size of the Internet seems to work in the plagiarist's favor. Search
engines can be useful for tracking down suspect passages, but even they have
their limitations, given the number, variety, and password-protected nature of
many websites. Even where search engines do prove useful, manually searching
the Internet for matches of hundreds of student papers can be a formidable
task.
That's from the Turnitin.com website, accessed in July 2003 ("Plagiarism and the Internet"). It's an advertisement, one that works on our fear. And in the innumerable media stories about students' plagiarism, fear and loathing are the dominant themes: fear that literacy itself is threatened by a "plagiarism epidemic," and loathing for the students and the Internet, who are responsible for the epidemic. Typically these media stories draw directly from Turnitin.com discourse, and typically they describe plagiarism-hunting--best exemplified by Turnitin--as the heroic counterforce. And then, if you're reading these media stories online, you're likely to see an ad at the bottom of the page--for Turnitin.com. Here, for example, is a brief passage from a story in last month's Washington Post. In this passage, the journalist is quoting from John Barrie, the owner of Turnitin.com:
""Any institution just relying on an honor code has their head in the sand," Barrie said. "None of our clients are interested in catching students cheating. All of our clients pay us to deter students from cheating." (Kalita)
Right. And there you have it: the cheating student and the valorous teacher who triumphs through the brave move of subscribing to a web service. And yes, if you scroll to the bottom of the page in the Post story, you're likely to see there an ad for Barrie's service. Equally likely, you may find ads for services that will provide you with term papers. Both are generated automatically. They're labeled "advertiser links," and if you click on the "What's This?" link, you'll get something along the lines of this:
These are paid advertisements that are selected and
provided by a third party. Each link will take you to a new site outside of
washingtonpost.com.
If you
have a comment regarding a link or any other advertisement on
washingtonpost.com, please write to me using
this form.
Sincerely,
Michael
Golden
Director,
Customer Care
washingtonpost.com[1]
Both the newspaper and Turnitin profit from keeping our fears running high: our fear, constantly piqued, will sell newspapers and increase the booming business that Turnitin is doing. Like Michael Jackson's mugshot, Howard Dean's "I Have a Scream" speech, and the images of abused prisoners in Iraq, the story of the plagiarism epidemic circulates in the media, numbing our minds with now-familiar representations, endlessly repeated.
And we become complicit in this plagiarism industry when we indiscriminately and uncritically accept the terms in which it presents pedagogy and the student-teacher relation. It is so much easier to participate in this economy than it is not only to acquire skills in the new literacies but also to figure out how to craft pedagogy that productively engages them.
But these hard tasks are in fact our responsibility. I'd like to conclude by quoting from a article in the journal Computers and Composition, by Dˆnielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati, who assert two beliefs:
First, we are witnessing students adapting their literacy, research, reading, and writing skills and processes to the virtual spaceÐÐand complexityÐÐof the World Wide Web. Second, first-year composition teachers have a key role in helping students adapt to this space, and encouraging students' critical research and writing skills in this space (193).
If we fulfill this role, if we accept this responsibility, we will find ourselves in a collaborative rather than agonistic relationship with our students, and our concerns about plagiarism will be limited to helping students move beyond the inevitable patchwriting, and dealing with the occasional determined plagiarist--the plagiarist who, Sue Carter Simmons' historical research demonstrates, has always been with us. We'll be out of the world constructed by the media and the plagiarism merchants, and back in our classrooms, where we can struggle with and enjoy our teaching.
Bleich, David. "In Case of Fire, Throw In (What to Do with Textbooks Once You Switch to Sourcebooks)." (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks: Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy. Ed. Xin Liu Gale and Fredric G. Gale. Albany: SUNY UP, 1999. 15-44.
Carlson, Scott. "Web-Loving Students Can Be Prodded to Cite Peer-Reviewed Works in Term Papers, Study Suggests." Chronicle of Higher Education 6 February 2003 <http://chronicle.com/free/2003/02/2003020601t.htm>.
DeVoss, Dˆnielle, and Annette C. Rosati. "'It Wasn't Me, Was It?' Plagiarism and the Web." Computers and Composition 19.2 (August 2002): 191-203.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Critical Inquiry and Research: Engaging Presidential Politics." Syllabus, Writing 205, Syracuse University, Spring 2004. <http://wrt-howard.syr.edu /Syllabi/205S04/Syl205S04.html>.
Kalita, S. Mitra. "Schools Use Software to Identify Plagiarism." The Washington Post 18 April 2004: PW04. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10170-2004Apr14?language=printer>.
Kates, Brian. "Can't Make Grade? Click on Cheat.com." New York Daily News 26 December 2003. < http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/46452p-43719c.html>.
Lewin, Tamar. "Writing in Schools Is Found Both
Dismal and Neglected." New
York Times 26 April 2003. <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/26/education/26WRIT.html>.
Petersen, Bruce T., and Jill N. Burkland. "Investigative Reading and Writing: Responding to Reading with Research." College Composition and Communication 37 (1986): 236-40.
"Plagiarism and the Internet." Turnitin.com. <http://www.plagiarism.org/research_site/e_what_is_plagiarism.html>. Accessed 17 July 2003.
Simmons, Sue Carter. "Competing Notions of Authorship: A Historical Look at Students and Textbooks on Plagiarism and Cheating." Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Ed. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1999. 41-54.
Standards for Success. Center for Educational Policy Research, 2003. <http://www.s4s.org/projectoverview.php>. Accessed 30 April 2003.
Winerip, Michael. "A Vital Touchstone for High Schools." New York Times 3 March 2004: B8.