Punish less, teach more
Writing professor advocates a pedagogical approach to curbing academic dishonesty.
Dr. Rebecca Moore Howard, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University and the author of Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (1999)
Better detection and stiffer punishments are often considered the best deterrents to student plagiarism. But a more effective long-term solution might be to change how we teach, according to Rebecca Moore Howard, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University and the author of Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators (1999).
As Writing Matters went to press, Howard was scheduled to give the keynote address for Texas A&M’s Academic and Professional Integrity Week, an event cosponsored by the University Writing Center. In advance of her arrival in College Station, Howard offered some thoughts via e-mail about why she advocates a pedagogical approach to dealing with plagiarism.
Howard finds that much of what we define as plagiarism comes not from any moral failing on the students’ part, but rather from their inexperience with writing from source material. Central to Howard’s understanding of plagiarism is what she calls “patchwriting,” a common practice in which student writers make only minimal changes to material taken from their research and then present it as their own. Patchwriting, Howard contends, represents “bad writing but usually not bad morals.”
“Textual standards usually inveigh against patchwriting,” Howard continues, “yet patchwriting is something that all writers do, in a very obvious way, in the early stages of learning. And it is something that many writers continue to do, unaware that they’re not really ‘getting’ what they’re writing about.”
Punishing such transgressions, Howard feels, accomplishes little, since it doesn’t address the cause of the behavior.
“I am not saying ‘Everybody does it; plagiarism is okay,’” notes Howard. “Rather I’m saying that the lines between plagiarism and intertextuality are inevitably blurred and shifting; that our current technologies are making that fact very obvious; and that we need to respond in a way that productively engages everyone in the intellectual issues, rather than trying to draw a line between the saved and the damned.”
So what can teachers do to help students move beyond patchwriting to write with the kind of authority that genuine scholarship demands?
“Most fundamentally,” says Howard, “assign writing. Secondarily, assign researched writing.” While fear of plagiarism may lead some instructors to avoid research-based assignments, that only compounds the students’ basic problem of inexperience.
According to Howard, “What’s lost [when students aren't expected to write] is instruction in synthesis and research. We have to be brave enough to continue assigning out-of-class, researched writing; we have to be patient enough to teach our students how to do it, even though soon those coming to college will have less experience in it than they now do; we have to be smart enough to design assignments (preferably in collaboration with our students) that are sufficiently compelling that they want to do them rather than buy somebody else’s paper; and we have to be dedicated enough to enter into the research process with our students, so they don’t break down in the writing process and plagiarize out of desperation.”
