Plagiarism

In class last week we worked on an exercise to identify plagiarism.  I expected this to be easier than it was.  Previously, it seemed to me that the issue would be pretty clear-cut; either the writing was plagiarism or it was not.  However, we worked with a scale of plagiarism that ranged from outright fraud, to simply inputting an entire quote, to legitimately good writing.

At times it was obvious that in an example the student had simply stolen the words of an author and tried to pass them off as their own.  There were also times that the student did a good job of citing a source, integrating it into their own writing, and including their own ideas.  The difficult examples were the ones in between these two extremes.  Sometimes it was difficult to decide if the writing was acceptable or not because it seemed like the student might be paraphrasing but on the other hand maybe they were not.  Sometimes students appeared to have tried to cite a source and not done a very good job of it, but at least their intentions seemed to be to give credit where it was due.  Other instances made me question what needed to be cited and what could be considered general knowledge.  In these cases hopefully a writing consultant could talk with the writer and determine if information needed to be cited and, if in fact it did, do so properly.

Further complicating the issue of citation was the fact that even within our class we could not agree on where in the scale certain examples belonged.  There was an element of interpretation involved that made me sympathize with students; how are they supposed to handle the issue when professors have the potential to be so subjective?

"What if drugs were legal?" Response

            For my Writing Pedagogy class this semester I have to keep a blog about my experiences with writing, tutoring, and my course work. One of our first assignments was to read a student paper that was written in response to an article about legalizing drugs and edit and comment on it.  I found that this was a more difficult exercise than I expected.

            While the paper needed a lot of editing, the assignment was not to tear apart the paper and edit every detail to make it better.  Instead we were expected to act as if this was a paper that we were actually confronted with in the Writing Center.  Thus, we had to consider not only the paper, but also the person who wrote it.  This means that I was concerned with helping the student and improving the paper as well as trying not to insult them or make them feel bad about their writing.

            I found it difficult to maintain a balance between correcting aspects of the paper and not criticizing the student too much.  It was hard to restrain myself from correcting every grammatical error, like the spelling of immigrant as “imagrant,” but I knew that helping the student effectively make his or her point was more important than worrying about spelling errors, which spell check could handle.  I tried to focus more on making sure the student wrote quality topic sentences and developed ideas fully.  The basic idea of what the student was trying to do was clear and I understood the argument, the problem was that it needed to be presented more effectively and with more supporting evidence.  I attempted to compliment the student on bringing up good ideas, while encouraging him or her to add more detail and go further with those thoughts.

            My main goal was not just to correct the errors in the paper but to encourage the student to work a little more on developing what he or she had started to do.  I tried to remember that this was not my paper to write and that I therefore needed to point the student in the right direction but not write the paper myself.  In the process I aimed to include both positive and negative, but constructive, comments.