Schenectady Synecdoche

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July 09, 2005

Ritter essay

I love reading fresh, sound scholarship on authorship, especially on student authorship. When I started working on the topic in the mid-80s, there wasn't anything to speak of. The scanty publications were mostly procedural: what to do with plagiarists, whether to kill 'em or just maim 'em. Now, however, there's a body of scholarship that can soon collectively claim the adjective "substantial."

Ritter's essay brings an insistence on looking at how students themselves represent their own authorship. She doesn't link her contemporary research to the historical work conducted by Sue Carter Simmons, but that conjunction would be worth pondering. She coins a potentially very useful term, whole-text plagiarism (606). And she interprets whole-text plagiarism as the result of students' seeing themselves more as consumers than as authors. For Ritter, this choice can be swayed by teachers' engaging students in an understanding and appreciation of textual ethics. I'm never comfortable with ethical discourse, and Ritter finds some slippage in my own treatment of that topic (607). I agree with her that current endeavors such as the Turnitin solution are ineffective. Certainly an emphasis on academic values is a good idea.

I think that perhaps even more effective is an emphasis on the rewards of learning—the learning that comes from doing one's own work. And of course pedagogy has to actually enable that learning, not just espouse it. Am I too idealistic in thinking that's possible?

But what's not yet a part of the rhetorical scholarship on authorship is study of the effects of various efforts. Neither honor codes, Turnitin, Ritter, nor I have yet demonstrated what happens when our recommendations are put to work.

Posted by senioritis at July 9, 2005 10:21 PM

Comments

Posted by: joanna at July 10, 2005 12:11 PM