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05/18/2004 Archived Entry: "plagiarism"

Maybe because a lot of semesters have come to a close recently, but the plagiarism hunters seem to be out in full swing lately on several academic(ish) blogs. Always an odd mix: teachers turned police. Students’ rights dis-assembled. Guilty, guilty, guilty, to quote (without citation) an old Doonsbury strip on Nixon (or was it Reagan?). The prison house of writing, Turnitin.com and its profit hungry clones, take center stage. Lock ‘em up cause they cheated! As righteous as they wanna be, the plagiarism hunters (out on the holy war of cheating, they rely on the habitual “gotcha”) forget a few useful tidbits as they make their mission accomplished and save the world from mis-quoted statements or lifted Internet passages:

  • Responsibility: Yo! Teaching Rocks. Don’t want to see plagiarism, start teaching the whys and hows of citation. And that means more than which style to use (is there a period or comma after the name?). Style is the least important issue here.
  • Citation is a service to the reader more than giving credit where credit is due.
  • Stop assigning boring papers (got to be blunt here; where is the challenge on the overworked “theme” paper or write about some forsaken “controversial” issue done to death already in the word-o-sphere).
  • Academic writing is one of the few conventions concerned with citation. Ain’t that the truth. Even English’s holy grail, literature, uses allusion at will (reference without citation) or marvels at intertextuality (reference without citation). Here the paradox emerges again: what’s good for the writers is no good for the student. Eh? See all them there blogs that don’t cite (except through the link). Well, that’s not for you!
  • Don’t you just love it when “journalism” is triumphed as fairness? Uh, journalists never cite the many stories or news clipping services they lift their ideas from. How do you think those bad or inaccurate stories get circulated so quickly? The journalists steal from one another. Take it from me. I was there.
  • The network could care less about citation.
  • Quotation, a.k.a citation without reference, is the grammar of 20th and 21st century writing.
  • “But that’s what the arts do, not academics,” they cry. Uh, so what? Art, McLuhan so rightly put it, sets the intellectual (and technological) agendas. No art for art’s sake here, bub.
  • Popular culture does it best. While university rule puts the magnifying glass to citation (“hey, this ain’t you!”), popular culture often offers the poetics of digital writing. See The Simpsons. See hip hop.
  • Uh, what about the writing?
  • Mix it up, baby. Then let it remix and remix again. Cause, whether you like it or not, that’s how writing functions (see ALL WRITING EVER, for examples).

    Replies: 4 comments

    i think i love you ;-)

    seriously, bravo!!

    Posted by Cindy @ 05/20/2004 11:45 AM EST

    "Stop assigning boring papers..."

    Hear hear. Kinda tired of reading and writing about everything the way its "supposed" to be done.

    Posted by Neha @ 05/18/2004 09:52 PM EST

    "The network could care less about citation."

    This is the best statement on plagiarism I've maybe ever heard. Think of Shaviro's Connected. The fact that we live in a network society has interesting implications for something like citation-- and not just the mundane handbook sense of citation in FYC. One of the problems is that "our" sense (in comp) of citation is tied too strongly to intellectual property rights. I'm not saying this shouldn't be an issue. Obviously it is. However, for theorizing citation in a broader way, we should maybe question the (here it comes) articulation of quoting-citation-property. These are three different things that tend to get conflated so much that we can't even see them as separate.

    Posted by jenny @ 05/18/2004 03:18 PM EST

    And plagiarism is like sex: Let me catch you cheating!

    Posted by Will @ 05/18/2004 08:22 AM EST

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