Blum, Susan D. My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture

Blum, Susan D. My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Print.

Blum, an anthropologist, bases her examination of plagiarism on today’s campuses upon interviews with and observations of students. As with most examiners of plagiarism, she argues that the issue is more complex than commonly understood, and spends a portion of the book exploring the history of citation practices, intellectual property, and plagiarism. Through this review, she suggests that, despite the current hysteria over plagiarism, it may not be a larger problem today than it has always been. However, given increasing collaboration in education (think of the many group projects students do at Ursuline) and the ready availability of texts of all sorts through the Internet, students’ attitudes towards citation and individual ownership of ideas may have undergone a profound shift from that of the previous generations who make up the faculty. In fact, Blum finds that “Today’s college students have been groomed to be successful, clever, and above all calculating: ‘Will this look good on my resume?’” (102). In short, they may have mastered the art of rhetoric so well in their ability to provide audiences with what they desire that what Blum terms “the performance self” has erased any authentic notion of self underneath it. Blum argues that as a result such students may not view writing as “the expression of a singular personal essence” (89), and so plagiarism would just be viewed as a means to an end. As long as it brings results about, then any moral component is irrelevant. As such, Blum suggests that honor codes as a means of preventing plagiarism will be unlikely to be effective. However she doesn’t suggest that a generation of sociopaths has been created; instead, she examines other factors of today’s culture that may also encourage plagiarism. One factor she finds is that the academic component of college is not central to students, who instead focus their college experience on co-curricular activities, internships/work, and partying. She writes, “For students who don’t care about the content of courses, or who only go through the motions of learning, plagiarism and cheating are strategies like any others, aimed at producing the best outcome (high grades) without impinging on what they really want to do with their time—socializing and relaxing” (124). Faculty who read the book will likely be shocked at how little students study, and even more shocked at how little this lack of studying seems to affect their grade point averages. Blum suggests that while we may want to blame plagiarism on the faults of individual students, the culture in which they were raised is also at fault, whether it be the higher cost of college (which Blum traces to the growth of administration) leading to greater pressure to succeed at any cost, the practice of student evaluation affecting faculty grading (i.e., faculty succeed by pleasing students, and not necessarily educating them), or parents loading students up with habits of taking on too many extracurricular activities in order to impress others and not because students are actually interested in them. And, though Blum, on pages 177-78, provides a variety of recommendations to lessen acts of plagiarism by students, she really can only suggest that the individual instructor teach “the genre requirements of academic writing” so students understand the importance of citation in academic culture (169), and that the larger culture needs to “lower the water table and return the youth of our society to drier, calmer ground, where they can hop, skip, and jump rather than cut, paste, and graduate” (180). Ultimately, Blum seems to trace the plagiarism plague not to a lack of education on the part of the students, but to the fact that they have learned all too well a larger lesson from a society that in the past decade has praised with money and other “honors” those who faked evidence to start a war, stole votes to win an election, made up accounting figures to pump up a company’s stock price, and cheated to win a Super Bowl: Any means is acceptable as long as you succeed. The book is available through OhioLINK.

Anson, Chris M. “We Never Wanted to Be Cops: Plagiarism, Institutional Paranoia, and Shared Responsibility”

Anson, Chris M. “We Never Wanted to Be Cops: Plagiarism, Institutional Paranoia, and Shared Responsibility.” Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies. Ed. Rebecca Moore Howard and Amy E. Robillard. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook/Heinemann, 2008. 140-57. Print.

Recently, I read two collections of essays on plagiarism, Who Owns This Text?: Plagiarism, Authorship and Disciplinary Cultures and Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies, in hopes of finding ways to minimize or even eliminate plagiarism on campus. Unfortunately, both books seem more intent on problematizing plagiarism than on offering practical solutions for how to negate or deal with it. Frankly, plagiarism is enough of a problem already, as students short circuit their own learning by representing the work of others as their own, so some of the scholarship offered in the books may come across as puzzling to the instructor frustrated by another case of plagiarism in a course, and looking for a solution to the problem. Though some of the essays in the volumes raised interesting points as to why students plagiarized, how definitions of plagiarism vary from discipline to discipline, and other matters, the only essay I can recommend entirely to instructors looking for suggestions on how to eliminate, or, at least, minimize plagiarism is “We Never Wanted to Be Cops: Plagiarism, Institutional Paranoia, and Shared Responsibility,” by Chris M. Anson. In the essay, Anson presents practical advice for how instructors can prevent plagiarism in their classes. He notes that if instructors keep the focus on educational goals and student learning, then plagiarism will decline in their classrooms. Critiquing traditional methods of instruction and plagiarism management, Anson argues for a more student-centered pedagogy. He writes, “A ‘solution’ to plagiarism that focuses primarily on policy, detection, and punishment does nothing to advance our presumed mission, which is education” (140). Anson realizes that such approaches look backwards, by which point plagiarism either will or will not be a problem, but do nothing to prevent its development beyond attempting to scare students into not trying it lest they be caught, even if many of them don’t understand what it is exactly that they would be guilty of doing. In fact, approaches such as assigning a piece of writing, providing no support to students writing it (instead of, for example, encouraging them to utilize the writing process or breaking down the writing into aspects and then dealing with them in class), and then collecting the writing at the end of the semester will often inadvertently teach students that the product is all that matters, and, thanks to the Internet, a vast amount of readymade products is available for the student to utilize. As Anson points out, “In the pursuit of learning, students have lightning-fast access to vast storehouses of information, increasingly rich and interconnected. Yet this information also comes to the computer virtually unscreened and unevaluated, making the Internet like a huge flea market where good finds are hidden among large quantities of junk” (141). Not only do students need assistance in determining the value of the information available for research purposes, but they also need assistance in developing their own voices among the electronic babble. To offer such assistance, at least as far as integrating sources into student writing, Anson, drawing on the pedagogical theories of John Biggs, suggests that instructors “might set up activities in the classroom in which students wrestle with challenging passages and learn how to incorporate them into their own texts or paraphrase them so as not to quote them directly, but still cite their source” (145). Furthermore, Anson advises that using more informal writing assignments might also help students learn as well as minimize plagiarism. He states, “. . . writing assignments can be relatively informal, focusing mostly on the concepts, ideas, readings, data, or other information in a course instead of the formal characteristics of the writing; or they can be longer, more formal, and more extended, with higher stakes for the nature and quality of the text. The longer and more formal the assignment, and the higher its stakes, the greater the teacher’s responsibility to support its development through, for example, the practice of certain intellectual and analytical skills and processes and through work on multiple drafts” (147). Helpfully, Anson lists some examples of both low stakes and high stakes assignments (150-52). Dealing with plagiarism can be frustrating for all involved, so if we, as instructors, can do anything beforehand while designing assignments to get students to understand the educational meaning behind them so that students will be less likely to plagiarize while completing them, then such efforts will likely be well-rewarded with fewer plagiarism investigations afterwards and students who have learned rather than have merely pretended to learn. The book is available through OhioLINK.

The Ursuline Gallery Of Writing Is Open!

The Ursuline Gallery of Writing is now open! Since today is the National Day on Writing, the National Council of Teachers of English have opened the associated writing galleries nationwide. The Ursuline gallery is located at http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/156018. Please check out the work of the contributors: Amanda Flower, Susan Fox, Joe LaGuardia, Olivia Wilhelm, and Polly Wilkenfeld. All the galleries will be open until next summer. Happy National Day on Writing everyone!

APA Update Uproar

Those of you who use APA format likely already know that it, like MLA, has been recently updated. Unfortunately, the update for APA has already needed to be updated itself. This article from InsideHigherEd.Com explains the controversy well. Until things settle down, you might want to stick with the previous version of APA. It appears that's the approach the publisher of The St. Martin's Handbook (6th ed), which we currently use at Ursuline as our writing handbook, has chosen since there has been no announcement of updating it to include the revised APA, which is something that was done for MLA.

McDonald, James C. The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for College Writing Teachers.

McDonald, James C. The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for College Writing Teachers. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Print.

Regard this collection of essays as a “greatest hits” of composition studies. Though essentially aimed at an instructor of the traditional college composition course, the book can prove useful to anyone using writing in the classroom. You will find the book easy to dip into since it is helpfully arranged into the sections of general theories and perspectives; audience and peer groups; composing and revising; critical thinking and reading in writing; computers; argumentation; form and style; grammar; and designing, responding to, and evaluating writing assignments. Below, I will note some highlights that we might find particularly useful at Ursuline. First of all, you will recognize a familiar name as our Vice President of Academic Affairs, JoAnne Podis, along with Leonard Podis, wrote “Improving Our Responses to Student Writing: A Process-Oriented Approach,” which offers advice on how to best respond to student writing. Another useful selection is “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively.” In it, Margaret Kantz explains how an unclear description of an assignment caused students to use a familiar genre of writing (narration) even though it didn’t fit the assignment. This reminds us to make our expectations as explicit as possible so as to avoid some common frustrations for both us and students (190-91). Essays by Betty Bamberg and Richard Lanham both offer some advice on how to teach students to revise more effectively. Unfortunately, if they revise at all, most students will revise only superficial surface errors such as a misspelling unless taught otherwise. As a result of such bad student habits as turning in first drafts as final drafts, occasionally instructors will complain about student writing, and often the complaint will include the claim that students need to be taught grammar more formally (usually by someone other than the one complaining, of course). Alas, as Patrick Hartwell points out in “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” research into the matter has determined that teaching grammar formally and having students do grammatical exercises has limited if any value for improving their writing. Instead, Hartwell recommends that writers read their writing aloud and note where their speaking corrects their writing and that instructors simply point out any remaining errors with minimal marking (334). The remainder of formal errors will only be avoided as the writer develops more expertise in that type of writing, and develops metalinguistic and rhetorical awareness (334-36). In fact, Peter Elbow, in “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment,” claims that a more effective way of improving student writing than punishing them for formal errors is to point out instead what the writer has done well and encourage her or him to do more of it (408). He writes that “reward produces learning more effectively than punishment” (408). Though not all the selections will be applicable to those of us teaching at Ursuline, the book contains enough useful advice that it is a good resource to consult for improving student writing. It is available through OhioLINK.

Wardle, Elizabeth. “‘Mutt Genres’ and the Goal of FYC: Can We Help Students Write the Genres of the University?”

Wardle, Elizabeth. “‘Mutt Genres’ and the Goal of FYC: Can We Help Students Write the Genres of the University?” College Composition and Communication 60.4 (2009): 765-89. Print.

In this article, Wardle proposes that the goal of first year composition classes be adjusted from learning to write to learning about writing. Her reasoning is that the traditional goal of freshman composition-- to teach students how to write in college--is essentially impossible to meet since disciplines vary so widely in their expectations for writing that no single general writing course could prepare students adequately for writing in their majors, so a revision of the course is needed. She notes that currently in composition courses students write “mutt genres,” which are “genres that do not respond to rhetorical situations requiring communication in order to accomplish a purpose that is meaningful to the author” (777). In short, students learn writing genres that are only useful in freshman composition, a course they will never take again. To rectify this, Wardle proposes that students study academic genres instead, and that instructors use pedagogical methods that have been shown to encourage the transfer of skills from one setting to another: abstraction, self-reflection, and mindfulness. She writes, “Why is this goal more achievable than the current one of teaching students to write? Because it teaches students a clear content—what we know about how writing and language work—and focuses on that content as the object of attention. Not only that, but the nature of that content nearly requires students to reflect on their own writing practices and the writing practices in courses across the academy” (784-85). While, we don’t have composition per se at Ursuline and do try to cultivate such transference skills in our Ursuline Studies courses, Wardle’s article is a good reminder that writing is a skill (or set of skills) that must be developed across the university “rather than relying on the false hope and promise of general skills writing courses” (785). We can also assist students in transferring skills across courses by teaching “general and flexible principles about writing” and explicitly discussing “similarities between new and previous writing assignments” (770). The journal issue including this article will shortly be available in our mini-library of writing instruction materials in the USP office.

National Day on Writing

The blog is back from summer vacation, and with some exciting news. Ursuline College will be participating in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) National Day on Writing event on October 20th. The event will celebrate writing in hopes of raising awareness of just how much writing we do every day, and what writing does for us. As their Web page describes, the day will "celebrate the foundational place of writing in Americans' personal, professional, and civic lives; point to the importance of writing instruction and practice at every grade level, for every student and in every subject area from preschool through university (See The Genteel Unteaching of America’s Poor); emphasize the lifelong process of learning to write and composing for different audiences, purposes, and occasions; recognize the scope and range of writing done by the American people and others; honor the use of the full range of media for composing; and encourage Americans to write and enjoy and learn from the writing of others."

To showcase the writing we do at Ursuline, we have a local gallery set up in NCTE's National Gallery of Writing. If you are a member of the Ursuline College community, please consider adding a piece of writing to the gallery. It can be anything you write at Ursuline from a list, an essay, a text message, a poem, a sign, a press release, or even a tweet! Please just be comfortable with others reading it. Click on the image below to send us your writing.