CCCC06: Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish?

Lila Harper’s presentation on “What We Can Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses” began with the assertion that people working on Master’s theses may not necessarily be familiar with the academic conventions surrounding documentation and plagiarism. She spoke with a particular expertise because of her responsibilities as thesis editor for a comprehensive university: she source-checks and copyedits every Master’s thesis submitted — typically about 50 per year — prior to its placement in the university library. Her initial assumption was that plagiarism would not be a concern, but when she encountered an unidentified acronym in the manuscript, she Googled it, and discovered several pages of unattributed material from another source in the student’s manuscript. Upon further research, Harper discovered that inappropriate use of sources is common among all graduate disciplines. Even skilled writers, she argues, have problems with the appropriate necessary “transparency” of citation (which can sometimes manifest itself as Rebecca Moore Howard’s “patchwriting”). Other problems include poorly worded paraphrases and indirect citation, and many of the confusions writers exhibit seem to be linked to the types of style manual they use. Not so much concerned with the “theft of knowledge,” Harper is instead interested in citation as a method of evaluating the foundations of a discipline’s mode of knowledge production.

Harper wants graduate students to ask themselves: do my enacted citation practices allow my research to be duplicated? Is the citation of sources sufficiently transparent? Harper offers a taxonomy of three types of style manual that students use to produce their research: first, there are the “prescriptive” manuals, like MLA, that offer “direct and emphatic guidance.” Then there are the “permissive” manuals, like Chicago, which “provide options: one may use a certain form.” Finally, there are the “descriptive,” typically associated with editor-oriented manuals in the sciences, which offer no “specific instructions, but rather describe what is the general practice in particular journals.” Harper gave some illustrations from MLA and opposed them to examples from Diana Hacker’s handbook, with Hacker contradicting MLA by demonstrating unacceptable borrowing of phrases or structure from the passage cited; and then showed how Chicago’s accepted “indirect quotation” can resemble Howard’s “patchwriting” and — even when properly cited — still be unacceptable by MLA standards. To conclude, Harper offered some final fairly commonsense guidelines (but of course, as her presentation indicated, such sense is hardly common) for ameliorating the cross-disciplinary confusion and lack of agreement over citation practices: use classes in students’ majors to go over discipline-appropriate documentation practices (especially paraphrasing); don’t send mixed messages by mixing style manuals; regularly employ assignments that require discipline-specific documentation and emphasize working with documentation practices throughout the drafting process; and simply make transparency in the monitoring and documenting of sources a much more prominent part of course discussions.

Joel Bloch talked about “Blogging and Plagiarism,” and argued that we need to ditch the criminalizing metaphor typically applied to plagiarists (recall Foucault’s historical argument from History of Sexuality about how same-gender intimate acts got reified into figuring the individuals themselves as homosexual; the change in focus from the deed to the doer). In its place, Bloch suggests the economic “gaming” metaphor and its notion that one needs to learn the rules in order to play the game. He desiged a sort of all-plagiarism all-the-time course and tracked one “Generation 1.5” immigrant student’s progress through the course. “Gen 1.5” students, Bloch says, are immigrant students brand-new to the system of American higher education, and often have considerable difficulties adapting to writing instruction. One scholar has borrowed from Hollywood and described the “student, interrupted” whose literate practices are interrupted by changes in linguistic and educational systems; Bloch cited Blanton’s research with an Ethiopian student and pointed out that students with literacy development difficulties often simply drop out, partly due to the divide between vernacular literate practices and academic literacy practices. For many in composition, the goal is to teach the genres that (my editorializing addition: are thought to) comprise academic literacy. The differences between systems of acknowledging sources of knowledge in vernacular and academic literate practices can often lead to accusations of plagiarism.

New knowledge, Bloch pointed out, is built upon older knowledge, but paratactic and hypotactic syntheses of old knowledge and new knowledge indicate the relationships in different ways: hypotaxis states explicitly the logical relation or progression, while parataxis juxtaposes for the sake of implicit comparison. This can sometimes lead to academic writing taking on exclusionary characteristics: Bloch gave the example of Fidossa, a Somali woman who took his required writing course. Fidossa’s literate practices came from the old Somali Muslim methods of reading the Koran, combined with the Somali military “government”-sponsored practices of nationalistic and deeply homogenizing modes of reading and writing. She worked hard in Bloch’s class, particularly in her use of the course-related weblogs where students could both develop the early stages of their academic writings while at the same time deploy their vernacular literacies. Also on these weblogs, students were asked to to share information about themselves that they would feel comfortable having made public on the Web, and–at the end of the course–were also asked to cite one another as “secondary sources” for their retrospective accounts of their writing. Bloch found that students inexperienced in academic literacies can still often produce high volumes of text, even if it is marked by syntactical difficulties. Furthermore, the temporal aspect of weblogs helped to make more visible the clear advancement of Fidossa’s literate practices.

The most significant difficulty Generation 1.5 students encounter, Bloch argued, was with how they tried (and sometimes failed) to “weave” their own ideas with those of others into their texts, at times working dangerously close to their sources to the point of approaching plagiarism, and at other times moving too quickly and too far away from their sources. Fidossa in particular encountered trouble in the way she performed that second too-quick move away, but her weblog also demonstrated her ability to take critical positions in the academic literacy mode. In his conclusion, Bloch suggested that the “literacy, interrupted” metaphor helps to frame both student strengths and student weaknesses, and the class weblogs helped to compose a heterogeneous literate practice that negotiated between the vernacular and the academic.

Finally, Mike Palmquist began his presentation by asking: Why do we publish? The academic publishing system, he asserted, works well enough, but not as well as it could. The problem is that there exists an overwhelming demand for publishing, but insufficient capacity to meet that demand. Palmquist proposed that our primary reasons for publishing are to share our work and ideas, to help shape our disciplinary practices and discussions, and to obtain material rewards such as tenure and promotion — and while we don’t publish for the royalties, and understand that there’s usually a felt altruistic aspect to publication, those material rewards shouldn’t be ignored. And, in fact, marketing considerations are often extremely important to small presses, since it’s all too easy to lose money in the publishing business.

After outlining these concerns, Palmquist gave a brief chronological précis of the academic publishing process, and then outlined what he sees as the problems with the process as it stands today. First, publication decisions are made based on the perceived size of the market, by acquisition editors-as-gatekeepers who typically are not practicing academics in the field, and who typically don’t have as much academic expertise as they could upon which to base their decisions. An average print run, said Palmquist, is 800-1400 copies; a very good run is 3000. As a consequence, the cost structures of publishing limit access for would-be writers, hinder career progress, and restrict the development of new knowledge.

So what can be done? Rather that throwing out the current publishing paradigm, Palmquist proposes usefully extending it. First, drop the market analysis, and replace with faculty review for scholarly merit. The development work currently performed by publishers’ staff editors should be shifted to the scholarly editorial board of any given series, and the work of copyediting should be shifted to the scholarly editors, as well, since this represents a very large portion of the current expenses to academic publishing houses. Furthermore, Palmquist argued, there is absolutely no reason the current publishing process should take 9 to 14 months after final approval: print-on-demand technologies (DocuTech, et cetera) and electronic versions could reduce turnaround time to a single month, resulting in much more up-to-date scholarship. (My editorializing: I definitely agree, but such a phenomenon would introduce an entirely new host of interesting complications for scholars.) Palmquist pointed to the texts at his wac.colostate.edu project as one example of an enactment of certain aspects of this new paradigm that has — according to his server statistics — massively increased the consumption of academic texts. The fact is, Palmquist pointed out, the medium doesn’t really make the ideas any different: digital genres are built on ones and zeroes, and books are genres built on pulp and wood and glue, but do those genres really change what’s being said? Does something Palmquist publishes change its meaning between dead-tree and PDF editions?

The benefits of what Palmquist referred to as the “distributed collaborative model” include reduced costs, author retention of copyright, publication of work not now financially viable, the publication of more works with scholarly merit, shrinking of the publishing time frame, and increased access, for longer periods of time.

So in the Q&A, I noted that there were some academic bloggers in the room (I was sitting next to Dennis Jerz), and asked whether there were any concerns about such folk making inappropriate use of the syntactic structures or phrases of their presentations in reporting on it, and wondered aloud as well how they felt about such folk sharing the ideas they’d shared.

They sounded like they were cool with it.