By Kate Daloz
A recent session brought together two topics I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: 1) plagiarism, especially in cases where students are confused about conventions; and 2) the practice of “dramatizing the presence of the reader” by narrating my reading experience, my primary mode in consultations.
The writer’s essay included one paragraph in which she had correctly quoted and cited a source. Further along, she offered a citation in a paragraph with no quotation marks. From talking with her, I gathered that the text around the second citation was at least patch-written, but possibly also lifted verbatim from its original source.
I hate this moment when it arises in a consultation. My discomfort comes partly from feeling obligated to impart a scary warning to a writer during a session in which I want them to feel safe to make mistakes and learn, but also from my own highly-mixed feelings about why penalties for plagiarism (as we have defined it in our American academic system) are so severe and draconian—to me, it’s the Rockefeller Drug Laws of academics. But my own politics aside, I am entirely clear about my obligation to the writer in a moment like this: to help them meet the expectations of their professor and institution.
I decided to try helping the student and working through my own discomfort with the same strategy: by narrating my experience of reading both the correctly formatted and punctuated citation and the ambiguous one. It went like this:
ME: OK, when I’m reading along here [expository text], I’m assuming that all of this is your words. Then I hit this quotation mark and I expect that everything between this one and the closing one are someone else’s exact words and that you’ll tell me in the text or in the citation whose they are and where you found them.
When I’m reading down here [section with citation but no quotation marks], this citation makes me think, Oh, she’s telling me that she got her ideas or information from someone else, but she’s retelling me that information in her own words. Because I don’t see any quotation marks, I assume it’s all your words. So if I find out later that it’s actually someone else’s exact words, even if you told me whose they were, it feels dishonest to me.
For this writer, in this case, this distinction cleared up the paraphrase-and-cite vs. quote-and-cite confusion she’d had. And I didn’t have to present the problem with her draft in terms of rules and penalties, but rather in terms of a real (American academic) reader’s experience and expectations.
There are still a lot of problems with this method—it’s super wordy, for one—but it was the first time I talked with as student about a possible plagiarism issue and felt like I wasn’t being forced into a policing mode with which I was deeply uncomfortable. It also confirmed part of what makes me really excited about the practice of narrating reader experience—that staying within that practice allows me to remain close to my most comfortable expertise, as a reader, and also gently reinforces for learning writers that their words are destined for a real person, really experiencing, their choices on the page.
Published March 9, 2015
