One construct that I am most interested about is plagiarism.
This construct is most visible in paraphrasing and research. Schools and
universities have very strict policies on plagiarism, so strict that it could
change your life in the scholarly world. We try to rephrase a sentence or fact
to avoid plagiarism in a way that we don’t change the meaning of the sentence.
Plagiarism directs us to sometimes move around words and sentences in a way that
defers the meaning or point of the sentence. Our concept of good writing when
it comes to plagiarism is working around it, coming up with similar but
different words to put in place of the ones already being used. In reality I believe that you can look at
plagiarism as something unavoidable. Somewhere someone has used the same words
as you have in a sentence so does that mean you are responsible for plagiarism?
Key Words:
PlagiarismOriginality
Research
Claims
Great proposal, Jada. This topic really interests me as well. I really like that last question that you pose: "Somewhere someone has used the same words as you have in a sentence so does that mean you are responsible for plagiarism?" We all "borrow" parts of language all the time to express certain things, but in academic settings, that borrowing is strictly regulated by various governing entities:MLA, APA, etc. There are a number of different roads you could do down with this topic. But it might be most interesting to challenge "academic" perceptions of what counts as plagiarism. You could do some primary research on this topic by looking specifically at plagiarism policies (either on a class syllabus) or a school or university website. That would give you some material to show how plagiarism is "constructed" in academic spaces. Then you could try to analyze those policies and show how they might be harmful, or simplistic. Do they discourage learning? Then you'll want to do some research to find out what other scholars in writing studies are recommending in terms of plagiarism. A good place to start is Rebecca Moore Howard's Writing Matters bibliographies, which I'll show in class tomorrow.
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