The
best reason to help students avoid plagiarism is not ethical but
pedagogical. We rightly insist that our students avoid the grosser
forms of plagiarism: having someone else write a paper, copying
whole papers or large blocks of text from unacknowledged sources,
downloading ready-made papers from term-paper websites. Why? Because
they can't learn to write by not writing. By cheating, students
simply avoid doing the work they have to do if they are ever to
develop their own skills as writers. . . . There may in fact be
a better reason for making students learn careful note taking
and scrupulous citation. That reason has less to do with intellectual
honesty than with intellectual maturity --- or at least with one
step in the process of maturing intellectually. Writing from sources
and documenting borrowings encourage students to acquaint themselves
better with the mechanisms by which they acquire knowledge. We
still want students to "make knowledge their own," but we also
want them to pay attention to how they do that. Instead of casually
and unconsciously "making knowledge their own," students need
to confront the complex process of drawing bits and pieces from
here and there, passing them through the clouded filter of their
own prejudices or critical judgment, and then trying to present
the results in a conventional format easily digested by their
teachers. Until students become more scrupulous about keeping
track of where they found information, they will probably not
begin to interrogate that information by asking whether it is
unbiased, carefully reasoned, and adequately supported by evidence.
The writing that emerges from their use of such a process is
almost never an original contribution to knowledge, nor do we
usually expect that it will be. Perhaps the best we can hope is
that occasionally an astute, motivated student will tell us not
something that no one has ever thought of before, but something
that the student thought of without having read it or heard it
from someone else. Student papers that express such thoughts are
precious to teachers --- precious partly because they are rare.
But the occasional original thought in a student essay provides
little justification for teaching the documentation expected from
the rank and file of undergraduates. For most students, writing
college papers will turn the spotlight of attention inward on
the student's own processes of thought and learning, and such
scrutiny will itself encourage those processes to change, to become
more sophisticated as they become more self-conscious. As students
use documentation to trace the pedigrees of the ideas they present
in their papers, they will become more aware of how they acquire
and transform what they learn.
From "Documenting Thought," 2002. If you'd like
to read David Flanagan's entire essay, contact him in the Department
of Writing at flanagan@ithaca.edu.
The
best reason to help students avoid plagiarism is not ethical but
pedagogical. We rightly insist that our students avoid the grosser
forms of plagiarism: having someone else write a paper, copying
whole papers or large blocks of text from unacknowledged sources,
downloading ready-made papers from term-paper websites. Why? Because
they can't learn to write by not writing. By cheating, students
simply avoid doing the work they have to do if they are ever to
develop their own skills as writers. . . . There may in fact be
a better reason for making students learn careful note taking
and scrupulous citation. That reason has less to do with intellectual
honesty than with intellectual maturity --- or at least with one
step in the process of maturing intellectually. Writing from sources
and documenting borrowings encourage students to acquaint themselves
better with the mechanisms by which they acquire knowledge. We
still want students to "make knowledge their own," but we also
want them to pay attention to how they do that. Instead of casually
and unconsciously "making knowledge their own," students need
to confront the complex process of drawing bits and pieces from
here and there, passing them through the clouded filter of their
own prejudices or critical judgment, and then trying to present
the results in a conventional format easily digested by their
teachers. Until students become more scrupulous about keeping
track of where they found information, they will probably not
begin to interrogate that information by asking whether it is
unbiased, carefully reasoned, and adequately supported by evidence.
