Re: Plagiarism/boilerplate

["The Writing Center" <wrcenter@irn.pdx.edu>]

Hi Lynell,

Cliff over here at PSU.  I just wanted to sympathize with you about the frustrations that students fell about the balkanization of documentation styles--not to mention the headaches it causes us having to explain the differences constantly.  I'm currently working on a website that tries to debunk the myth of a monolithic documentation system.  BTW, most faculty haven't much of a clue about how byzantine documention has become.  Anyway, when I get it finished, I'll let you know the address.

Cliff Barnett
barnetc@irn.pdx.edu
PSU Writing Center

>>> "Lynnell Edwards" <ledwards@cu-portland.edu> - 3/6/98 2:19 PM >>>


Denise, et al,

I appreciate your thoughtful response to my post, especially the ways that you complicate the notion of "plagiarism only matters in the academy" with your experience with writing in a law firm.  I didn't mean to imply in the first part of my response that intellectual property isn't worth defending as much as other property --- just that that's all we have, really.  I suppose institutions are defined in some ways by their "property rights"  and we'd be fools not to fight to the death for our rights to intellectual property.  Because if we lost it, we'd have nothing left.

But I think we have to talk more explicitly about how plaigarism and the taboo against stealing intellectual property is a construct of the academic ethos, (and a relatively recent one at that) and not some transcendental value that comes down as the 11th commandmant, when the rest of the culture is basically telling them otherwise.  (How come nothing in TIME magazine is ever documented MLA style?)

It also informs the subsequent conversations we have about documentation styles --- they represent the particular values of disciplines.  Students get angry and frustrated about variations in documentation styles because when they learn one they mistakenly think they're learning some kind of universal axiom about documentation; documentation makes no sense because it seems random, arbitrary and subject to the whims of the professor. It defeats them because it appears that they could never know or guess all the possible rules.  And sometimes, from the WC perspective it looks that way to me too.  We get all varieties of "formatting" and "documentation" requirements, some of which look absolutley unacceptable for academic work.

"My instructor said we didn't have to document anything we used from the textbook"

"My instructor said use MLA style, only please single space long quotes and indent them on both sides"

"My instructor said as long as we do a bibliography page we're okay."

Aaaaarrrggghhh!

I've said enough; and in fact most of what I think is really interesting in this post was finished by the first paragraph anyway.

lynnell edwards
concordia university, portland or