Writing from Sources
Teacher's Responsibility for Avoiding Plagiarism
All writing is writing from sources, including past experience, observation, and gathered evidence. Academic writing usually requires students to read print sources, synthesize them, and write arguments with them. Thus, we should spend time in first-year writing teaching these skills. Indeed, the WPA outcomes for first-year composition include using writing and reading for "inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating," as well as evaluating, analyzing, synthesizing, and integrating primary and secondary sources. While composition isn't a reading course and shouldn't focus on literary interpretation, the course should include using reading to produce writing. Furthermore, the most recent WPA Statement on Plagiarism urges writing teachers to spend time on "reading heuristics" that help students acquire these writing-from-sources skills.
1 . Teachers' Responsibility for Avoiding Plagiarism
• We should think of ways to teach students how to handle textual sources rather than thinking of ourselves as plagiarism police.
• Think of writing from sources as a progression of skills; thus, students will have a progression of difficulties. They might engage in "patchwriting" or "excessive repetition" of source material rather than synthesizing thoroughly. They may have difficulty with citation conventions and use "insufficient citation." They may include others' oral ideas without acknowledgement, thus having "unacknowledged collaboration." We should recognize these problems in drafts and require rewriting (Howard).
• We should recognize and punish "fraud" and "ghostwriting," or deliberate dishonesty (Howard). Certainly, when we find students have bought, downloaded, stolen, or otherwise acquired papers they didn't write, we must take appropriate disciplinary action. Know the procedures for dealing with this and tell your students.
• Include in your syllabus ways you will deal with these problems so that students understand the importance of this skill (Howard). For example, discuss patchwriting as part of their process toward integrating sources, but make it clear that you'd require revision if this still existed in final drafts, that insufficient citation earns an F for the paper, and that fraud/ghostwriting results in an F for the course and disciplinary actions. This way, students know they're accountable for writing from sources correctly but that you'll teach them how and require lots of accountability along the way.
• Design activities that require individual approaches and multiple tasks along the way to avoid canned responses.
• Learn students names, interests, ideas, writing styles, and make them know that you care about their ideas and want them to write papers that explain, "How does it seem to me?" "What do I think of this material?"
2. Reading Heuristics
• Practice different types of reading tasks in class, including fast, light, skimming and slow, analytical reading. For example, you may have students compete to be the first to find a piece of information. Other times, reward slow, careful textual support and commentary. Help them become aware of various reasons for reading, especially reading to think about issues. Design sequenced questions that require students to re-read for various purposes (Bartholomae and Petrosky).
• Have students read a variety of texts-academic essays, newspaper articles, comic strips, bumper stickers, brochures, newsletters, web site-and discuss the different rhetorical features and reading strategies they use.
• Teach notetaking, highlighting, annotating, marginal notes, charts, and outlines.
• Always discuss the rhetorical situation of essays; teach students to read this in the acknowledgements section if there aren't explanatory headnotes in the text.
• Teach the rhetorical aspect of textual production so students understand the purpose of textual conventions such as citation and documentation.
• Decide and explain to students the reason for using essays in writing classes and design activities accordingly. For example, are they reading for models of rhetorical strategies or for evidence in their papers or both?
• Use rhetorical outlining that encourages students to analyze both what the writer does (how, form, rhet. strategies) and what the writer says (content) (Bruffee; Bean).
• Use structured reading responses so students practice the same task multiple times. I call mine "rhetorical reading responses," which require a précis of what the text says and separate places for students' personal responses and analysis of specific questions/features. Woodworth describes the "rhetorical précis," and Roberts and Jacobs describe the précis for literary works.
• Allow students opportunities to revise their written interpretations of texts based on additional readings (Osborn; Lu). They should explain this "re-vision" either orally or in writing for group work, class discussion, or cover letters for papers. These type activities help them "hear" the author's voice as they read and create their own writing voice.
• Focus on evaluation of evidence and re-presentation of evidence in various formats, including argumentative format.
3. Writing from Sources Activities
• Find and read two or more articles about the same topic and write a comparison or evaluation of significance. Students learn to analyze and evaluate evidence.
• Have them imagine and write an author's response to another reading or issue using the style, rhetorical strategies, and content of the first essay.
• Discuss (and complicate) the conventions of citation, including the "common knowledge" rule (3 or more places), in terms of rhetorical situation rather than staid, abstract rules so students understand the purpose for evidence and how to handle it for particular audiences. Our goal should be to invite students to participate, to think and write about texts, even though their initial attempts will be clumsy (as are ours).
• Use research journals to help students track the development of ideas as they read sources. Encourage them to turn in papers with separate cover sheets explaining the development of their ideas.
• Design multiple opportunities to practice summaries of essays. Practice summary in their own words as a distinct activity from interpretation. Do this with essays the whole class reads and compare summaries and account for differences.
• Have them write "multi-voiced" drafts in which each different source, including their "own voice" is a different color/type font.
• Bring in both popular and scholarly periodicals; divide students in groups, give one popular and one scholarly periodical to each group, and have them determine all the differences between the two. They can write the differences on overhead transparencies to share with the class.
• Have them use different colored pencils/highlighters to mark summary, quotation, paraphrase, and own ideas in own and others' drafts (Mattison in Price).
• Cite students' class contributions in assignments and activities; emphasize that students should cite their classmates' oral or written contributions to papers.
• Have them take positions on the readings; put them into groups and require that they find textual evidence for the position. Put this on transparencies and have the class "vote" on the most persuasive evidence.
• Write different types of arguments about the same topic. Have them use the same textual evidence for various purposes.
• Write rhetorical analyses of readings, either out of class or in class. Have them look for one particular rhetorical feature and write about this one.
• Meet with them in the library and help them gather resources. Design activities that help them cite, summarize, and evaluate their sources before the first draft is due. Alternately (or additionally), require that they bring in sources and have them summarize, quote, paraphrase, and document the source.
• Have them write alternative interpretations of the same source.
Works Cited and Consulted
Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky. Reading the Lives of Others: A Sequence for Writers. Boston : Bedford , 1995.
Bean, John , Virginia A. Chappell, and Alice M. Gillam. Reading Rhetorically. Longman, 2004.
Bruffee, Kenneth A. A Short Course in Writing . 4th ed. New York : HarperCollins, 1993.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty." College English 57 (1995): 788-806.
---. "Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism." College English 62.4 (March 2000): 473-491.
---. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999.
Lu, Min-Zhan. " Reading and Writing Differences: The Problematic of Experience." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York : MLA, 1998. 239-251.
Osborn, Susan. "'Revision/Re-Vision'" A Feminist Writing Class." Rhetoric Review 9.2 (Spring 1991): 258-273.
Price, Margaret. "Beyond 'Gotcha!': Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy." CCC 54.1 (September 2002): 88-115.
Roberts, Edgar V. and Henry E. Jacobs. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Upper Saddle River , NJ : Prentice Hall, 1998.
Woodworth, Margaret K. "The Rhetorical Précis." Rhetoric Review 7 (1988): 156-165.