Teaching about plagiarism (or not)

When we encounter instances of plagiarism in student writing, they are very rarely the result of cold calculation or malicious intent. Plagiarism is usually the result of panic reactions to overwhelming pressure or of an unfamiliarity with the premises of academic knowledge production. In both those cases, plagiarism originates in an institutional failure to provide students with strategies of academic writing that make them feel secure in what they’re doing.

One aspect of this institutional failure is that we have normalized a view of plagiarism as a moral problem instead of a technical one. In my experience as a student, when plagiarism was addressed in academic writing instruction, a lot of effort seemed to be put into instilling the fear of academia’s righteous wrath into us by evoking the dire consequences of fraudulence and intellectual theft.

This is a problem because it puts students under a kind of blanket suspicion. It assumes that they are all potential fraudsters if they aren’t extra vigilant. It’s a deficiency-oriented way of teaching that focuses on mistakes and punishment and ultimately stifles academic expression. It took hard work to emancipate myself from the anxiety of doing things wrong and the fear of committing plagiarism by accident. ¹

So, what can we do better in our writing instruction? First, we can avoid student-shaming and fear-mongering and frame plagiarism exclusively as a very specific technical problem. Second, we can put more effort into explaining the underlying reasons for why academics are so invested in authorship, attribution, and accountability.

Teaching students about plagiarism as a technical problem is useful because for many best practices of scholarship it is not at all self-evident how exactly they work.

Consider questions like these:

• When is a paraphrase too close to the original (even when properly referenced)?
• Which factual statements can count as common knowledge and which need to be backed up with a citation?
• How to deal with it when you find out that someone else has previously had the exact same insight as you?
• How many words constitute a quotation that needs to be referenced?
• Which technical terms need to be referenced? When do I need a specific page number for those and when is referencing a volume or even just the author enough?

The answers to these questions are not easy to give, they usually require a look at the individual text with knowledge of context and of comparative cases. It is easy, even for experienced scholars, to get it wrong ², so teaching best practice on the technical level to novices takes a lot of effort, examples, and exercises.

I frame the learning of best practice as the acquisition of a positive expertise that gives access to the communal project of academic scholar­ship

But I feel that this part of teaching writing is best done by avoiding the mention of ‘plagiarism’ entirely: the word alone raises affective filters that are not useful.

Instead of telling students “do not do this, be careful to avoid that” and thereby framing writing as a precarious endeavour that can easily lead to errors and disastrous missteps, I frame the learning of best practice as the acquisition of a positive expertise that gives access to the communal project of academic scholarship and science.

Most importantly, if we introduce students into the positive practice of scholarship – i.e. putting forward an idea, making an argument, taking and defending a position –, they will avoid plagiarism as a matter of course. Once you understand yourself as a scholar, plagiarism as a moral problem – stealing someone else’s idea and hiding the fact – doesn’t make sense anymore.

I think this is one of the reasons that I as a writing supervisor almost never receive papers with plagiarized sections: My supervision practice is geared toward taking students seriously as researchers and empowering them to express their own ideas. This in itself, together with empathetic strategies of communicating about the individual student’s writing process, reduces anxiety levels to such an extent that students don’t get into a position where they would see plagiarism as a way to cope with pressure to perform.

Students don’t need moralizing lectures with a wagging finger. What they need is:

• the freedom to explore their own ideas and writing styles,
• an explanation of why the scholarly community puts such great value on making an original argument, making the author’s positionality explicit, and disclosing all intellectual influences,
• and they need to be welcomed into and made part of this scholarly community with their own meaningful contributions.

If, all throughout your school career, you have learned to internalize and regurgitate ‘scientific fact’ and hegemonic knowledge, the underlying individual scholarship becomes anonymous and invisible. It’s just not easy to see why we should cite any individual author for an idea that seems to be treated as universally accepted fact. Textbooks in school or university don’t usually reference their sources in detail – they summarize the state of the art and thereby hide that scientific knowledge is the result of long and difficult processes of contestation and negotiation, often over minute details, where the contributions of individuals matter hugely.

So, only if students are granted ownership of their own ideas can they understand why individual authorship, accountability, and attribution are so important in science as community-based knowledge production. If we do this first, then the issues that we now call plagiarism will become so rare and minor that we don’t even have to teach students ‘about plagiarism’ anymore.