Comments on: Let’s Plagiarize!

By: Sharon Taylor

Sharon Taylor — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:12:47 +0000

I like this idea and am passing it on.

I do a similar exercise with beginning academic writers in which I have them write a paper about Cheating - taking whatever tack they like. I read them first a personl paper in which I defend cheating (in computerized card games, in my case). It helps open the discussion about why cheating occurs.

Most student scheat out of desperation or fear - being honest about that helps us to change it.

By: vitia » Blog Archive » CCCC06: Bullshit!

vitia » Blog Archive » CCCC06: Bullshit! — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 06:00:57 +0000

[…] To start, she began by describing how she “asks students to compose two to three pages of bullshit on vague topics like fear or patriotism,” because plagiarism and bullshit both spring from a failure to prepare. (I wonder what Amy would make of my plagiarism sequence.) Robillard cited Lindquist’s description of the “what if?” characteristics of academic discourse (and one of Lindquist’s working-class Smokehouse respondents, “Walter,” who declared “Bullshit on ‘What if!’”) in order to propose that writing teachers might do well to play up the connections between “what if” and bullshit. In characterizing some forms of discourse that he used as “bullshit,” Walter disowned his own rhetorical labor by devaluing it, and in so doing strategically held on to the working-class identity he privileged, by proposing that his affectual and authentic working-class rhetorical strategies were inherently more valuable that the “bullshit” that — to some — exists as rhetoric for its own sake; word-wanking without referent or valuation. […]

By: bradley

bradley — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 02:07:13 +0000

I like the assignment mike. I think I’ll give it a try, though we are all but done for the year and I’ll probably forget before it’s time. Still, I’m on a quater system, so I’ll have at least two times to give it a go, or two times to forget to do it because I’m swamped. Cheers!

Bradley

By: senioritis

senioritis — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 01:41:45 +0000

I’ve done something along these lines at the sentence level, first encouraging students to appropriate language from source texts and then leading them to understand the text by learning how to write about it without appropriating language. I love the idea of doing this on the more global scale of whole chunks of text.

By: Sin

Sin — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:45:31 +0000

That’s a great idea. I wish someone had tried that with my college English classes. I was unfamiliar with the concept of plagiarism before attending university (just by virtue of going to school in Pakistan where we’re encouraged to produce work by copying it from places), and something like this would have been incredibly useful. You’re particularly right about how students tend to plagiarise not because they’re incapable of doing the work, but because they’re stressed out and want to produce everything on time, as well as they possibly can, even if that means appropriating what has been done by other people. Personally, I blame the focus on grades and achievement over actual learning (wasn’t that nice and overly simplistic?).

By: mike

mike — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 01:29:12 +0000

Hey, VC, thanks. As I incompletely hinted here, students made some judgments about the sorts of sources the sample student essay cited, so yes there was some evaluation going on, and a lot of it came out in classroom discussion as well in terms of judging the appropriatness of certain sources for the audience addressed. But, yes, it’s definitely important, and we’ll be following up on the homework questions about the nature of sources next week.

By: verbalchameleon

verbalchameleon — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 20:21:09 +0000

Hi Mike,
I LOVE this. I am wondering also if part of what you do afterwards is deal with the nature of the googled sources. It’s not just that students are ripping off online sources, but that they don’t always have the critical approach to what google spits out. OTOH, there’s some darned fine stuff on google if they do choose and then use it appropriately.

I see that your follow-up involves library work. But do you address the nature of the sources plagiarized in the first step as being potentially part of the problem?

Thanks for sharing this!

By: mike

mike — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 04:14:11 +0000

Thanks, all, for the feedback. I’ve posted a follow-up describing in more detail how it all worked — and, I gotta say, it all worked fairly well. Collin, Dennis, I’m very much with both of you on the thoughts you offer about the lines between learning the assignment and doing the assignment, and on the self-awareness that it takes to follow certain conventions, and the way it came out this time is the most comfortable I’ve felt with it yet. And, Tutor, there was a bit of transgressive glee, but I hope as well an awareness of the recycling and going-beyond moment to which you point.

By: The Happy Tutor

The Happy Tutor — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 01:41:54 +0000

Thanks, Mike, for taking up the idea and making it real. How do students respond? To they feel transgressive and sly? Exhilerated? Seems to me you are teaching a valuable skill. Research is recycling and going beyond prior work. What else is the format for doing a dissertation? It just comes down to giving others credit for what they have done. And thank you for the link.

My wife teaches English composition in high school, and she may adopt this as an assignment too.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:55:26 +0000

I like this a lot, Mike. Almost (but not quite) makes me wish I were still teaching. I will, however, pass it on to my lovely better half, who has to face this stuff frequently in her accelerated-pace-adult-working-students-who-have-to-take-humanities-classes teaching.