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

I'm teaching a group of intermediate student writers as opposed to the advanced class I usually cover, and truth be told, I'm a little nervous. I'm okay with the focus on sentences and paragraphs as opposed to essays and longer works, but I know I won't be able to focus so much on critical thinking skills like questioning one's own assumptions and claims. Those, to me, are some of the most rewarding things to teach: I'm not just teaching them how to be better writers, but also better thinkers! I love seeing the "ah-ha!" moment in their eyes as they realize the complexity of an issue.

As I thought about this, I started getting reminiscent about a course I created for graduate students who needed familiarity with graduate school writing genres, so I did a needs analysis and found an incredibly useful textbook for them: John Swales and Christine Feak's Academic Writing for Graduate Students. The book has chapters on writing summaries, data commentaries, critiques, problem-process-solution texts, and general-specific texts, as well as an introduction to writing IMRAD articles. Most of all though, I appreciate the first unit, which is "an approach to academic writing" (after we got through the introduction, I would revisit the unit's title and point out how even the title displays the cautious tone of academic writing since it is not "Academic Writing" but "An Approach to Academic Writing" (emphasis added)).

There is an invaluable activity in the first unit called "Gene's Conclusion" (which is renamed "Sam's Conclusion" in the third edition for some reason). The activity describes a student who writes up an effective conclusion, but then realizes that there are limitations and weaknesses in his data set that he has not described anywhere else in his paper. Should he acknowledge these in the conclusion or should he sweep them under the rug? I love this activity because in the four semesters I taught this class, it never failed to generate a lot of discussion. After a short time, students usually broke into three schools of thought:

These students appreciate this point and make a mental note to write cautiously and quickly see the value in hedging their statements.

These students cannot accept failure. And they're also big fans of time travel:

"If you find problems, you must go back and fix it."
"But you don't have any money. You used up all your funding to get the data you have."
"Um... well, you need to get more money."
"You can't do that. The publishing deadline is coming up soon. You're under the gun."
"..."

The silence becomes too uncomfortable and usually leads students to defect to...

For these students, transparency of this kind is a tough sell:

"Don't do it. You should never talk about your weaknesses or problems."
"Never?"
"Yes. It will be bad. It's better not to mention it."
"But don't you think it will look more thoughtful and meticulous to note the limitations of your data?"
"No. It's better not to mention it. Maybe no one will notice."
"But suppose someone does notice, what then?"
"So I should point out my own mistakes? Then what will I look like? People will see me and think, 'He is stupid!'"
"No, no, they won't think you're stupid. It will be the opposite effect, actually."
"What? How?"

Then I tell them a story about a AAAL conference I attended back in 2011 in Chicago. There was a man who presented an experimental treatment that his data seemed to support as effective. He finished his presentation and began fielding questions.

"Could you go back to the slide with the results on it?" an astute woman in the back asked. He flipped back in the PowerPoint to a slide that looked like this:

Can you see the problem?

I found a very funny article about Congress being divided over a bill that is entirely blank. As I read it, I couldn't help but notice how well written it was in terms of newspaper style (it's also not too far-fetched given the productivity of Congress in general). I thought about using this article in class for identifying source credibility. I could give them several sources and send them home with them to determine their credibility. 

I think with more and more research being done strictly online, teaching students how to discern a trustworthy website from an untrustworthy one is essential. Even more so, students need to be able to navigate the different agendas and biases that are an unavoidable reality. A good video I like to have students watch is the Wolfgram Memorial Library's Evaluate Web Pages Video, which gives a great overview of the criteria for evaluating web page credibility:

This reminds me of an activity I did when I was teaching freshman English to native speakers. I gave them four websites and they had to write a paragraph about each that evaluated their credibility, but most importantly, they had to identify the bias in each one. One was a white supremacy page featured in the video above, another was a US government page, another was some random website on caffeine addiction chock full of spelling errors (which I can't find anymore), and the last was a pro-gay rights website. Interestingly, despite having a discussion about every source in the world having some level of bias or an agenda, only two students out of all my students that semester noted any bias in the US government website and the gay rights one. They all remarked that the government website was "just a government website" and that the collection of gay rights petitions was a page that had "no bias or agenda. Only facts."

I think it's a tough pill to swallow that (almost) everyone is selling something even if you happen to agree with him or her, but as teachers, I think we ought to try to encourage that kind of disinterested critical thinking anyway.

Have a good weekend, and good luck out there!

-Bill