Last week I spent some time with my cousin’s children, Drew, 4, and Brady, 6. We were swimming in the pool at my apartment. Drew would swim to the left, so would Brady. Drew would swim back to the steps, so would Brady. Drew would plunge under the water, so would Brady. You get the idea. Drew emerged from the water exasperated.
Drew: (Whine)
Brady: (Whine)
Drew: Stop it!
Brady: Stop it!
Drew: He’s copying me!
Brady: He’s copying me!
In my head, I replaced the word copying with “plagiarizing.”
Drew: Stop plagiarizing me!
Brady: Stop plagiarizing me!
The change in language made me giggle, which further upset Drew, but also altered the way I thought about plagiarism.
Drew: (Whine)
Brady: (Whine)
Drew: Stop it!
Brady: Stop it!
Drew: He’s copying me!
Brady: He’s copying me!
In my head, I replaced the word copying with “plagiarizing.”
Drew: Stop plagiarizing me!
Brady: Stop plagiarizing me!
The change in language made me giggle, which further upset Drew, but also altered the way I thought about plagiarism.
I dislike plagiarism for a number of reasons, one of which is I, like Drew, find it terribly annoying. The other is that it is constantly changing, which is also incredibly irritating. Price notes in her article that one of the main obstacles to solving the problem of plagiarism is people like me who just want to pretend that plagiarism is “something fixed and absolute” (Price, 89). Ok, so it isn’t a static problem, and pretending it is won’t solve any problems. The simple fact that I could see plagiarism in a petty argument between 4 and 6 year-olds further illustrates that this issue has many different manifestations.
Drew and Brady were at each others throats for the rest of the day, partly because they were both tired and hungry, but for the sake of this blog let’s pretend it was due to Brady’s plagiarism. Because Drew saw himself as the “author” of his actions, he was pissed off, and rightly so, by his brother’s blatant copying. My key term is classroom community; as I watched Brady and Drew, I couldn’t help but think that if they were my in my classroom, Brady’s actions would have been detrimental to the community.
I want all of my students to see themselves as authors. Too often students see “authorship” as something far from themselves, separate from what they are doing when they write a paper for class. Kelly Ritter touches on this in her article “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition.” She pinpoints one of the many problems creating plagiarism as students’ “negligible desire to do one’s own writing, or to be an author, with all that entails in this era of faceless authorship vis-à-vis the Internet” (Ritter, 609). By reinforcing the role of the author in my classroom, I hope to erase this sense of “faceless authorship.”
We are all authors. Me. Brady. Drew. The students in my class that I haven’t met yet— yep, authors. All of us. Articles don’t write themselves. Neither do the essays you can buy online. And plagiarizing any author, anywhere is a slap in the face to the rest of us. Classroom community is dependent on trust, integrity and respect for the author. Although the definition of plagiarism is always changing, I doubt it will ever fall under that classification.
Drew and Brady were at each others throats for the rest of the day, partly because they were both tired and hungry, but for the sake of this blog let’s pretend it was due to Brady’s plagiarism. Because Drew saw himself as the “author” of his actions, he was pissed off, and rightly so, by his brother’s blatant copying. My key term is classroom community; as I watched Brady and Drew, I couldn’t help but think that if they were my in my classroom, Brady’s actions would have been detrimental to the community.
I want all of my students to see themselves as authors. Too often students see “authorship” as something far from themselves, separate from what they are doing when they write a paper for class. Kelly Ritter touches on this in her article “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition.” She pinpoints one of the many problems creating plagiarism as students’ “negligible desire to do one’s own writing, or to be an author, with all that entails in this era of faceless authorship vis-à-vis the Internet” (Ritter, 609). By reinforcing the role of the author in my classroom, I hope to erase this sense of “faceless authorship.”
We are all authors. Me. Brady. Drew. The students in my class that I haven’t met yet— yep, authors. All of us. Articles don’t write themselves. Neither do the essays you can buy online. And plagiarizing any author, anywhere is a slap in the face to the rest of us. Classroom community is dependent on trust, integrity and respect for the author. Although the definition of plagiarism is always changing, I doubt it will ever fall under that classification.
The bottom line is plagiarism is not a victimless crime. In fact, it’s a victim-full crime. Plagiarism anywhere fucks with the rest of us, from just pissing us off to inspiring fear that our own works may be plagiarized too. So, I challenge my students to think of it this way:
Ladies, when you go to prom and that girl who sits next to you in math is wearing the SAME DRESS as you (and you know she knew you were going to wear it because you were talking about it in class) it pisses you off, right? That nasty ho, she knew exactly what she was doing when she bought that dress…. Yeah, think of that next time you consider plagiarizing another author’s work. Don’t be a nasty ho.
Fellas, you come up with a killer date idea to win over Cindy, the hottest girl in school, and you share it with your pals over lunch. Then Adam steals the idea, and gets to Cindy before you do. That sucks right? And it’s clear that Adam is a lame friend who will never amount to anything in life. Think of plagiarism like that. You don’t want to be a lame friend, do you?
(Do those examples even make sense? Maybe a little?)
From the mirror,
Claire
ps- look at this: http://badplagiarism.weebly.com/
Claire,
ReplyDeleteI really like your statement asserting that plagiarism, "isn’t a static problem, and pretending it is won’t solve any problems."
This is so true. Your examples really show the diversity and various forms that plagiarism can take. And it is annoying! (I hate the copycat game!) I think students can definitely relate to your last two examples; no one wants to be a "nasty ho" and we all know who those people are.
I, too, want my students to see themselves as authors. How can we do that? Is it possible to force students to take pride in their own work?
I'm not sure. But I think that if we show interest in their writing, they will too.