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Plagiarism
Feb. 13th, 2016 10:11 amThere's an ad on Weather Underground for a service called Grammarly. "Proofread your essays for grammar errors & instances of plagiarism," it says. I've never thought of plagiarism as something to be resolved through proofreading. That implies that people do it by mistake. That people either don't know what plagiarism is, or that they do not have enough language skill to reformulate concepts.
This makes me think of the instruction I've received as a student about avoiding plagiarism. It's very functional instead of conceptual. Clear directions about how much verbatim use of source material is allowed without a citation and/or quotation. I'm fortunate enough that that always seemed like a really silly, and even incomplete, way to explain plagiarism and the need to credit people for their thoughts and ideas. It's a system that I've never had to internalize because it's always been intuitive. For people for whom it's less straight-forward though, it must feel like a frustrating puzzle. A set of arbitrary external rules. If you're approaching concepts not as tools to apply to your own thinking but as discrete concepts to hunt down and recount to show you've done the reading, maybe having to explain where those ideas came from or rewrite them "in your own words" (a phrase that's always kind of rubbed me the wrong way) just seems like a pointless hoop to jump through. It's plagiarism in the same category as spelling and grammar problems; functional, not conceptual. But how do you teach a concept, rather than a form and function, in a way that can be internalized the way I've always done naturally?
This makes me think of the instruction I've received as a student about avoiding plagiarism. It's very functional instead of conceptual. Clear directions about how much verbatim use of source material is allowed without a citation and/or quotation. I'm fortunate enough that that always seemed like a really silly, and even incomplete, way to explain plagiarism and the need to credit people for their thoughts and ideas. It's a system that I've never had to internalize because it's always been intuitive. For people for whom it's less straight-forward though, it must feel like a frustrating puzzle. A set of arbitrary external rules. If you're approaching concepts not as tools to apply to your own thinking but as discrete concepts to hunt down and recount to show you've done the reading, maybe having to explain where those ideas came from or rewrite them "in your own words" (a phrase that's always kind of rubbed me the wrong way) just seems like a pointless hoop to jump through. It's plagiarism in the same category as spelling and grammar problems; functional, not conceptual. But how do you teach a concept, rather than a form and function, in a way that can be internalized the way I've always done naturally?
