Discovery and Dialogue

My key term, discovery, has not been as present in this week’s reading and discussions about plagiarism as it was in the first three weeks of the term. In fact, it is a notable absence because plagiarism is an avoidance of the act of personal discovery in and through writing.

To prevent plagiarism in first year composition, all five strands have provoking paper assignments. In “The Economics of Authorship,” Kelly Ritter emphasizes the teacher’s role in originality of students’ work. She writes, “We should write original, compelling assignments so that they won’t be recycled; we should be sensitive to student pressures and stress when we assign work” (620). Such assignments push students to reflect on their own experience, develop a personal voice, and, hopefully, discover something about themselves along the way.

When I teach in the fall, I plan to discuss plagiarism, copyright, and fair use doctrine in terms of a dialogue. In first year composition, students are entering a new academic community full of ongoing dialogues—between established writers in the field, their peers, and their teachers. Their paper assignments open up a dialogue between me as a reader and the student as a writer. As in a spoken conversation, I want to hear what they have to say; a recitation of someone else’s words just will not work (and is rather disrespectful to all parties involved).

Margaret Price advises us, “The most constructive way to approach teaching plagiarism is to invite students into a DIALOGUE about the subject, welcoming their perspectives on its complexities” (105-106). Conventions of citation and documentation do evolve, and as Ritter points out, some students plagiarize by mistake because they do not know the conventions. Therefore, I have one line to add to my course policy sheet: Ask questions! Ask yourself questions. Ask me. Ask another teacher. Ask a librarian. Ask a friend.



This dialogue started by:

Price, Margaret. “Beyond ‘Gotcha!’: Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002): 88-115.

Ritter, Kelly. “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition.” College Composition and Communication 56.4 (2005): 601-31.

Rife, Martine C. “The Fair Use Doctrine: History, Application, and Implications for (New Media) Writing Teachers.” Computers and Composition 24.2 (2007): 154-178.

Hunter, Rik. “Erasing ‘Property Lines’: A Collaborative Notion of Authorship and Textual Ownership on a Fan Wiki.” Computers and Composition 28 (2011): 40-56.