TL;DR: Student's new writing practices put them at risk for plagiarism, but it can be helped!

I was having my students practice paraphrasing sentences from an academic article, and so I thought I would make it really meta and have them paraphrase an article about international students paraphrasing.

Here is the paragraph they used which is from page 116 of Introna and Hayes (2011) (which happens to be a very informative article on the issues involved in using plagiarism detection software):

I took the underlined sentence and had them try to paraphrase it. Many of them didn't know the phrasal verb "draw upon" and told me the meaning was to draw and color, so in my head, I was thinking like this:

I had to explain about the old meaning of "draw," which survives in their dresser drawer (not like actually lives in there--it's an old meaning that is fossilized in "dresser drawer").

I can remember when I wrote papers in college, I used the text fragment strategy. Since this is becoming a dominant strategy used by students, rather than viciously cling to the old note card system*, I say go with it and offer these words of caution (if these steps are not followed, there is a BIG risk for accidental plagiarism):

1. When you copy text from another source and paste it into your paper, put quotes around it and add bibliographic citation information IMMEDIATELY  (e.g. author last name and year if using APA). Even if you will paraphrase it later, still put quotes in case you get distracted and forget. Every semester I tell them about how when I was "seventeen and crazy," one time I put the quotes around my source fragments, but I didn't give the bibliographic information (author and page number) since I reasoned that it would take too much time ("I'll go back later and add the citations"). In the end, I spent over 2 hours re-finding all of my source locations. This seems insane to me now, but with my age has come wisdom. Remember, young people are still very smart, but their impatience makes them reckless (am I actually referring to young people as a "them"? Oh dear!).
   
2. Not putting quotation and citation information puts you at risk for plagiarizing because you might forget where the information came from! One of the saddest [#firstworldproblem] things about my seventeen-and-crazy story is that I had to delete some of my quotations because I couldn't find where the page number was (I highlighted it, but I highlighted many other portions of the text).
3. Think of writing your research paper as cleaning your kitchen or house: It will be much more time efficient if you clean up (cite!) as you go.
4. Read over your quotations and consider paraphrasing them (remove the quotation marks but keep the bibliographic information!)
   

For those of you who may not know what Introna and Hayes are talking about with text fragments, I'll give a brief description of how I went about writing my research papers:

1. First, find good quotations.
2. Copy them.
3. Paste them into a document.
4. Add quotation marks.
5. Add bibliographic information (author, date, page)
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you have "enough" information (this is obviously subjective)
   
7. Begin writing your own ideas and connecting them to the quotations you have added.
8. When the quotations are not particularly striking, keep the citation but change the wording and paraphrase it. I like to keep the quotation and write my paraphrase below it so I can see that it is in fact different from the original.

Regarding Step 7, this is something I recommend for my ESL students. When teaching native speakers, we tell them to read the source, understand it, and then look away from the source and write what can be remembered from the gist of it. This sounds practical, but for a non-native with a less-than-native vocabulary, it may be very difficult to find other words. Many of my good students (read: conscientious and hardworking) who have plagiarized insist they did not copy and paste but that they typed every word. I like to take this at face value and assume the student is actually telling the truth. The most likely explanation (in my mind, anyway): The students have no other vocabulary to "fall back on" so to speak, so along with the idea (the gist), they get the exact wording stuck in their heads, and they cannot separate this idea from the wording. Therefore, I tell my students to stare the source text in the face and write their paraphrase below it until they can SEE that it is using different vocabulary and grammar.

Soon I will write about paraphrase strategies for ESL students since the "read it and then look away and write your summary/paraphrase" strategy does not work for non-natives.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

*Comments on the "Note Card Method": When I was in high school, I was required to use note cards for research papers. I loved my high school English teachers, but I hated this approach. It was incredibly frustrating, time-consuming, and unnecessary. I hope no one still does this.

TL;DR: "Most international students who plagiarize aren't trying to pull one over on their teachers."

I've been dealing with a lot of plagiarism lately (well, actually, I deal with plagiarism in my upper level writing classes all the time). There are a couple of issues that I have seen develop out of my many meetings with students, but for this entry, I'm only going to talk about intentionality.

The often knee-jerk reaction to finding out a student copied several sentences or even a paragraph word-for-word is to become insulted, indignant, even wounded. I went through this a lot in my first years of teaching. I got really upset, and it took a lot out of me.

And then it kept happening.

I had to know why. I revisited my teaching on paraphrase and citation, I looked for better teaching materials, I gossiped around water coolers and read stuff online. Eventually I came across the concept of the word "plagiarism" being too broad. Basically, it includes both the malicious plagiarizers and the clueless/accidental/misunderstanding ones. It really exists more on a continuum:

Obviously, egregious stuff like essay purchasing is clearly malicious, and most students couldn't not know that this would upset their teacher. The trouble is that even stuff that is on the far end (deleting one word out of a sentence or leaving material unquoted) can be committed by very sincere and well-meaning students. Let me share how I know this.

Back in 2009, I remember the Director of Composition requiring students to purchase They Say / I Say with Readings. Her rationale was that ENG 101 was a writing course, and so many students were getting bogged down by having to find good sources for the bibliographic essay that it lead to poorly written papers based on sources that very often were not that good to begin with. By giving them a set of sources to start using, it opened up possibilities I had never thought of:

• Students had more time to read, understand, and write
• Students had easy access to some quality sources
• Since we had access to the source texts, we could better gauge reading comprehension and also paraphrasing ability
  

This last point was very useful to me when I started teaching ESL. What better way to assess students' paraphrasing skills than to have access to all of their sources before they even started writing?

This all ties into a conversation I had on Monday with a coworker who has the same strategy with assigning source texts. She had her students writing annotated bibliographies, and surprise, surprise, some of them were plagiarized.

"It's obviously not malicious. They know that I know all of the sources--so it's not like they're trying to pull one over on me!"

This is the crux of the matter: The high rate of international students plagiarizing cannot all be attributed to deception, especially since it happens even when students are well-meaning and know their teachers cannot be tricked.

-Bill