Re[2]: question re using citations

[stephend@GVSU.EDU (DENISE STEPHENSON)]

     The ownership of intellectual property is in great debate these days. 
     I know we seldom teach our students about changes as they are 
     happening, but I'm not sure we can deny the changes.
     
     I'm also aware that when it comes to writing across the disciplines, 
     we do not agree at all about what needs to be cited or how. (I'm an 
     interdisciplinary scholar; I know this well.) I recently gave some 
     workshops for senior health science majors. In meeting with the 
     professors ahead of time, I discovered that they don't use quotations 
     in the health sciences. They do still cite as we might in English or 
     History, but they never quote. I've also read ERIC papers (which I 
     can't cite myself at the moment) that discuss how some of the sciences 
     find it perfectly acceptable to quote verbatim from textbooks or 
     encyclopedias or the like when it comes to "standard knowledge." They 
     say it doesn't matter how a student writes the portion of a report 
     that is repetitious and commonly known. No quotation, no citation, 
     nothing. These are academics saying this about writing in their 
     fields. 
     
     I write this because what we hold as a great sin, punishable by 
     expulsion, is not the same in every culture (read that culture in the 
     small sense of various discourse communities and culture in the larger 
     sense of American, French, Saudi Arabian, Spanish).
     
     And yes, this IS a real problem in writing centers. I challenge my 
     tutors to bring it to students' attention as potentially dangerous, 
     but only the student in conversation with the faculty can know just 
     how dangerous.
     
     Denise Stephenson
     Grand Valley State University