What happened with plagiarism in my class

I kept my direct responses in email and in class very neutral.

Then we did an exercise.

I talked about paraphrasing, summarizing, and indirectly citing, and said what I wanted was for everyone to learn a particular form of writing a sentence, paying special attention to punctuation marks, like so:

According to X, because of Y, Z (X 637).

For example:

According to William Broyles, the U.S. should reinstate the draft because it would fairly distribute the burden of military service (Broyles 637).

Or optionally, for variety's sake:

According to X, Z, because Y (X 637).

We took the essay they'd read for homework (in theory - though most had not read it). In groups of 2-4 people they tried to come up with one sentence modeled on the formula above - one sentence that would sum up the article's main point!

I think only one group of 7 did a reasonable job of this. The other groups mostly took an impressive sounding phrase (word for word) from the end of the essay (or the beginning) and stuck it after the "According to Broyles" bit of the sentence - with or without quotes.

So that showed me VERY clearly that most of the class, in fact I think all of them but two or three, did not understand how to talk about something that someone else has talked about. They didn't get how to paraphrase (though we had practiced it a bit) or how to cite or what plagiarism was.

I gave for a humorous example a fake lecture from my mom to me on how I should dress and how I shouldn't and on the subject of my hair (a bit unfair to my mom who really does not care all that much anymore, most of the time, except on alternate Tuesdays). and then, if they were to describe that lecture to someone else who wasn't there, and assuming the relevant information was on page 417, they would not say,

According to Badgerbag's mom, you should dress like a grownup and your hair is idiotic (Badgerbag's mom 417).

nor

According to Badgerbag's mom, " you should dress like a grownup and your hair is idiotic" (Badgerbag's mom 417).

but rather

According to Badgerbag's mom, professional women nearing age 40 should wear nice office lady clothes from the mall, and they should not have silly hair, because that would be appropriate for their age and social class (Badgerbag's mom 417).

From this exercise I conclude the two students were not plagiarizing consciously - they really did not understand the basic idea. I suddenly get that from all our work in class, they now get how to talk in their own voice about their own opinions.... but doing this, I have to teach with examples and practice!

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Comments

[blaize]

Ok now that was impressive. You took what was initially perceived as intentional wrong doing by a student and turned it into a very positive experience for them and for you.

[JM]

But how does that address the text lifted from essay farms?

[WhatLadder]

Were you using MLA format? Because technically, if you mention your mom in the sentence, you only need the page number at the end. /nitpick.

[badgerbag]

Oh, I know! I knew I was teaching them the wrong way. 8-( But at that point I felt like that particular detail was not going to get across and was going to confuse them even more. I hope we did get down the basic idea of needing to cite, using the full name of the person the first time and then afterwards just a last name, and the punctuation issue. They are only just grasping that you say "Broyles 467" and then that clues you in to look at the works cited page and then you see the full citation.

So I taught them slightly wrong on purpose... If I were better prepared I probably could have explained it clearly.

I just spent another half class period talking about this and running them through two more examples. There is still mass confusion. I wish I'd realized this was a key issue from the beginning of the class!

[Rick Keir]

[crowd, in unison] Yes. We must all talk in our own voice about our own opinions.