Memoirs of Spruill, a Plagiarist

In my composition classes, my students just read their rhetoric's chapters on plagiarism and how to avoid it. Of course, because of my own ideological perspectives, I have wanted to subvert common-sense, naturalized views of plagiarism and copyright as moral/ethical issues. So, my students are also researching the history of copyright and blogging about their thoughts.

Teaching these chapters and thinking about the issues from the perspective of an academic interested in new literacies (where issues of what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement are considered problematic) has made me recall the one time in my life that I myself plagiarized. What follows is my own confession along with a self-analysis of why I plagiarized.

As a sophomore at Moore High School, I was assigned a term paper in my Biology class. The way the assignment worked was as follows: the teacher had a list of possible topics which students were to sign up for, so that there were never more than one person talking about the same topic (probably to combat plagiarism, since students couldn't copy off of other students). I was one of the last students to get a chance to sign up, so I got stuck with the topic of Prostatitis.

The night before the assignment was due, I realized that I hadn't done a bit of research or writing. So, I sat down with an old medical reference book that my mother had bought second hand when I was a baby and she wanted to stop calling the pediatrician for everything. I performed the classical plagiarist move of copying the book but changing words that I didn't know so that they didn't seem out of place.

I was (and still am) the kind of kid who was scared to death to do anything bad, because I was always convinced that I would get caught. So when I got the paper back with the comment, "you should write for medical journals," I just knew that the teacher knew and that his response was a subtle way of saying "I know where you got this." But he didn't, and I got an A, both on the paper and in the class.

Now, years later, I am a writing teacher. So it's valuable to look back at my own crime and analyze why I did it. After all, I was not a lazy student. I was a very good student, which is actually probably at least partially what allowed me to get away with it. So, why do good students plagiarize? Obviously, I do not claim that my experience is representative, but here is what led me to commit plagiarism:

1) The topic. I was a good student, who loved to read. But this topic was a total dud. By the time I was able to pick a topic, I could only pick a topic in which I was not at all interested and a topic that was actually kind of creepy (high school boys do not want to think about or talk about inflammation of the prostate). This problem led to problem two.

2) I waited too long. Only hours before I was to turn the paper in, I still had not started. Many teachers agree that it is often the good students who plagiarize. This is a product of last minute pressure by students who are afraid of failing an assignment that they waited until the last minute to begin. So there is pressure on good students to perform well. For this reason, a good student will not want to turn in aomw have baked crap. And, for me, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that the assignment was a dud. I am and was a meticulous student, but and I am and was also a bit ADD. So, the fact that the assignment was not the least bit interesting to me made it awfully easy for me to neglect.

So what, then, are the implications of my story? How do we see to it that our assignments discourage, rather than encourage plagiarism? To finish off here, I will address what we can do to write assignments that will help to our students avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

First, design assignment topics that tow the line between too open and too narrow. Allowing a students to simply write about anything may keep a student from straying beyond his comfort zone, and would make it easier for a student to hand in papers from the fraternity file. So an assignment should be specific enough and closed enough that the student must write his own material in order to fulfill the assignment.

But there must also be enough wiggle room in the assignment that the student does have at least some input into the topic. Freedom within boundaries is the goal. This allows the student to make the assignment her own in such a way that it will hold her interest, at least enough to get the assignment done.

Secondly, revision should be built into the assignment sequence. Though, by and large, we all except the importance of revision, a number of classes still do incorporate revision into the class. A teacher should be viewing, and commenting on multiple drafts of each paper. Doing so allows the teacher to watch the process of the student, which makes last minute plagiarism much more difficult. It also provides milestones for the student so that the student must work on the paper bit by bit, draft by draft. This negates the possibility that the student is waiting until the last second to begin a paper.

I don't intend to argue that these techniques will solve the plagiarism problem. Though these are cornerstones of the writing process in my classes, I still do face about one plagiarism case a semester. But these do a long way toward solving the problems that cause otherwise conscientious students to plagiarize.