emotionally” (52) that leads to his or her cheating in composition, and Hamalian makes a case to his teacherly readers that “plagiarism can be controlled by the methods” he puts forth in the article. Sound familiar? This cat-and-mouse dynamic between teachers and their cheating students is not new.
Despite these early forays into the subject, plagiarism has been slow to emerge as a major concern in composition studies; yet, the issue cuts to the core of writing pedagogy and theory. Despite decades of process pedagogy(s), discussion of plagiarism remains locked in a product-oriented paradigm; but what is plagiarism if not a question of process? Traditional views would see it simply as avoiding or circumventing the writing process, but a more complicated view shows that writing processes—reading, analyzing, understanding, synthesizing, and integrating the writing of others—always touch upon and often overlap with the notion of plagiarism. Indeed, these are basic concepts of theories of writing as a social process.
Aside from this fundamental relationship between composition theory and plagiarism, there are other important reasons plagiarism is, or should be, a central concern of composition studies—practical, institutional, and cultural (i.e., technological) reasons. On a practical level, plagiarism at least seems virtually ubiquitous across composition courses and programs. This is so much the case that almost every first-year rhetoric and research guide has something to say on the subject. Moreover, because, obviously, students are typically expected to write a great deal more in writing courses, and class size is relatively small, teachers of writing are more likely to encounter plagiarism, intentional and unintentional, and/or to recognize it; they are also best positioned to recognize and take advantage of teachable moments. However, why limit discussions to those few, scattered, and idiosyncratic moments? Why not, instead, create opportunities to teach about the murky territory of plagiarism in advance?
There are, likewise, important institutional reasons for composition studies to claim plagiarism. When Deans of Students, Provosts, and Offices of Judicial Affairs constitute and reconstitute “plagiarism” in simple, uncritical ways and in so many different ways across (and sometimes within) institutions, the issue can become seriously confused. Further, these myriad constructions of plagiarism shape student-teacher relationships in ways that are beyond our control, unless the issue is foregrounded in explicit, complex ways. While the field rightfully resists the notion that first-year composition be a “dumping ground” for whatever doesn’t fit neatly into the curriculum elsewhere, compositionists must also ask, “If we don’t take charge of this issue, who will?”
Institutional concerns are particularly true with the advent of plagiarism detection software, which raises our next important set of reasons for plagiarism to be a central concern of composition studies: the cultural or, in this case, the technological. Developing technologies, one might say, have forced composition studies’ hand on the issue of plagiarism. As Charles Moran argued in 1993, and Cynthia Selfe in 1999, developing technologies have fundamentally altered both writing processes and, therefore, the teaching of composition. We should not underestimate the role technology has played in the recent development of the cultural issue of plagiarism. Despite longstanding “honor” traditions, anti-plagiarism policy statements, and professors’ many seemingly ironclad anti-plagiarism strategies, plagiarism as an issue has had an especially powerful effect on the field of composition and rhetoric in the years since computer technology and the Internet were introduced. It is both a growing topic of scholarly discussion—philosophically, politically, and academically—and a marketable one. As plagiarism has become perceived as an epidemic and a scourge upon academic ethics, it has consequently become a big business, and technology seems to be playing a major role. In fact, we can use technology itself to show us just how much more culturally visible plagiarism has become: A simple Google Scholar citation search for “plagiarism” in the publication title field yields 139 citations from the years 1950 to 1980, and 4,280 citations for the years 1981 to 2012.
The assumption, supported by a lot of anecdotal evidence, seems to be that the explosion of the Internet over the last 15–20 years has caused a massive increase in plagiarism. The argument is that it’s now easier to cheat—to cut and paste material from a website, or to download a paper from an online paper mill—and so students are doing it more than they ever have. Resisting this claim, Donald L. McCabe and Jason M. Stephens make an argument that the Internet is not the cause of increases in plagiarism but is rather “just a conduit, offering a more expedient means of engaging in a behavior that one is already doing.” In other words, the cheaters were going to cheat anyway, and now they have the convenience of technology and the Internet to help them. A second technological consideration is the rise of plagiarism detection services (PDSs) such as Turnitin. Services like Turnitin require a subscription fee, and universities invest in subscriptions and then urge, if not require, students and faculty to use the services. PDS software’s emergence and popularity on college campuses has a significant impact on composition studies, in scholarly conversations, in teachers’ practice, and in students’ perceptions about writing (see Donnelly, et. al.).
These technological facets of the plagiarism issue bear heavily on scholarly discourse in the field of composition studies. As with many issues relating to writing pedagogy, there is much debate; in the case of plagiarism, however, ethics in teaching are often called into question, which is serious business in composition and rhetoric. PDSs take on a celebration and criticism of their own, and they become the springboard for passionate discussions about best practices in teaching. In his attempts to carefully analyze Turnitin, Bill Marsh points out
that while recoding plagiarism detection as pre-emptive education, Turnitin.com still makes its money by pulling unoriginal work out of a sea of so-called originals. In short, Turnitin.com profits by battling those instances where learning goes wrong but nonetheless must dress its combative strategy in the uniform of pre-emptive educational reform. (“Turnitin.com” 435)
While his words don’t overtly criticize the instructors who use Turnitin’s services, the embedded message in his analysis is that those educators who use it as an anti-plagiarism tool may be contributing to Turnitin’s duplicity, which indirectly challenges their ethics as teachers. On the high school English front, however, Thomas Atkins and Gene Nelson turn to Turnitin as a source of ethics enculturation:
If students are allowed to use others’ words and ideas as their own, they deny themselves the opportunity to develop writing fluency and critical thinking skills. This service is not designed to be punitive; it is meant to be preventive. The main goal of TurnItIn.com is to help students maintain their ethics and academic integrity, while learning the skills that will help them communicate effectively. (101)
With so many scholars in composition studies trying to investigate the values and writing relationships that students bring with them to postsecondary education, the words of Atkins and Nelson become critical to the conversation on plagiarism in college composition. Yet the conversation becomes even more complicated by the pointed criticism of Rebecca Moore Howard, who has studied and written extensively on the issue, and who does not hesitate to write candidly about how she believes PDSs erode the identity of students and the ethos of the teacher:
Type in your credit card number, paste in a student’s paper, press a button, and voila! Plagiarist caught or writer exonerated; anxiety assuaged. Catching plagiarists is just as easy and requires just as little thinking as does the plagiarizing. [. . .] Plagiarism-detecting software also helps teachers describe the issue solely in terms of individual students’ ethics, thereby avoiding the difficult task of constructing pedagogy that engages students in the topic and the learning process and that persuades them not just that they will be punished for plagiarizing but that they will able to and glad to do their own writing. In place of the pedagogy that joins teachers and students in the educational enterprise, plagiarism-detecting software offers a machine that will separate them [. . .]. (“Understanding” 8, 11–12)
In reading these voices, it’s not difficult to hear the tensions. After all, at the heart of this conversation about plagiarism is the teaching of writing; and at the heart of teaching writing
