Introduction Our society today has become obsessed with plagiarism and how to properly cite and source

information. As Rebecca Howard argues, in her article about plagiarism, taking other peoples ideas and using them as your own can be considered an academic death penalty. Its as simple as it sounds, if you are caught plagiarizing or someone thinks you have plagiarized there are no second chances, no going back, just plain and simple you are done. Not only is this Howard's ideology, but also it is of the vast majority of people. I wanted to find out if these new ideas proposed by scholars were reaching the minds of students and professors. I conducted and interview of ten students and ten teachers to find out what their views on plagiarism were. But first, I will explore these ideas that writing scholars are putting forth about plagiarism. Colleges and universities around the country all have very strict no tolerance policies on plagiarism. Harvard University, being one of the strictest. If students are caught doing any of the following, they will be expelled from the university: submitting work that is not theirs, improper citation, any paraphrased material not cited, and submission of work from another class. These are all common things that people will get in trouble for doing. Note that all of these so-called forms of plagiarism all receive the same punishment, one is not worse then the other. People need to start acknowledging that everyone makes mistakes when writing, and instead of expelling that individual from the writing community, they deserve some assistance so that they can prevent plagiarism in the future.

Scholarly Views

There are many different forms of plagiarism, some being worse than others. For example, patchwriting, ghostwriting, copying, and itertextuality are all forms of plagiarism. Many scholars have argued that the idea of plagiarism may not be as bad as most people think, or rather that teachers and the writing community are taking it a bit to far and not being completely fair with their punishments. One of the most common places people hear about or see plagiarism is in academics. There are stories all the time of students getting caught plagiarizing on all things from major research papers to small journal entries. Yet, when you look at the punishments that are handed down for each of these types of plagiarism or anything in between they are not even close to the same. I do not see the reasoning behind why the punishments should not be the same, because is it less important or deserve a lesser punishment to take the words of a fellow student rather than take the words of a famous published writer? This question brings me to explore the idea of patchwriting. Patchwriting is when someone takes a paragraph or sentence of something that is already written and changes the words around to make it their own. If a student is caught using this technique of plagiarism it can be a serious offense, leading to suspension or being expelled in college. The problem with this idea of patchwriting is that it is very hard to determine what is and what is not patchwriting. Rebecca Moore Howard brings up this idea of patchwriting in her article Plagiarism, Authorship, and The Acedemic Death Penalty saying that patchwriting can be a good learning tool for young writers. She talks about how it can help them to better understand the writing process and what is acceptable and what is not, but unfortunately this is not allowed because of strict policy. Teachers have to follow to strict

of policies in the classroom setting when looking over and grading papers. Most of the time there is not room for error on the students part when it comes to patchwrting or plagiarism if you could even call it that. The point that Howard is trying to make is that if schools and teachers would just give students a chance to correct their mistakes and learn from them in the long-run they would be better off. When a teacher hands a student back a paper with a zero on it because he or she plagiarized or at least the teacher thinks that they did, thats not teaching the students anything. When teachers do this, all its saying is that the students made a mistake and he or she is left wondering where or how. Another form of writing that could also be considered plagiarism, but is not by most peoples standards, is ghostwriting. Ari Posner talks a lot about this idea in his article The Culture of Plagiarism, ghostwriting is where someone else writes a paper or speech for another person. For example, the principal of a school, or the president of the United States, or a famous writer all are people that would have ghostwriters to write things for them. What happens is the ghostwriter writes a paper speech or whatever they are being told to write, and then it gets passed off as something that for example the president wrote but really it was just his secretary. These ghostwriters rarely get credit for their work, and if they do it is just a small mentioning in the works cited. In todays writing society this idea of ghostwriting is not considered plagiarism. Have you ever asked yourself where all of your ideas for papers and all the different writings you have done in your life come from? They had to come from somewhere, and I am sure that you were not the first to think those thoughts or come up with those ideas. This is what is called intertextuality, which James Porter discusses in his article Intertextuality and The Discourse Community. This is the idea that all texts and writings

have come from somewhere else. Whenever you write a paper, someone before you had a similar idea or thought and probably wrote about it. Teachers and professors always tell their students to be original in everything that they write and not take other peoples ideas. In Porters article he talks about this idea of originality and if anything we ever write is really original or not. Have you thought about where all of your ideas for research papers come from? It is really from other peoples research and not just your own. Going back to the idea of patchwriting, intertextuality is kind of the same thing. Intertextuality is the idea that all texts contain some sort of traces from other texts, and nothing is really original or your own idea. So then, if our writing society considers patchwriting to be plagiarism, then why not intertextuality? I believe that it is like this because without the idea of intertextuality, literally anything that we wrote or said would be consider to be plagiarism. I also think if our society is going to consider patchwriting to be plagiarism then it also needs to consider intertextuality as a form of plagiarism. This would clearly never happen though because then nothing would be considered original or your own. Interview Methods A lot of the time when people do interviews to get information they just interview up to four or five people. I think the reason for this is because they already know what most people say so they dont feel the need to waste their time. I thought that I knew professors would say about the issue and I also thought I knew what students would say. As I started interviewing, I found that my predictions were wrong. For this reason I felt it necessary to get a very wide range of information from students and professors of all ages. To be specific, I interviewed twenty people. Ten professors ranging from ages 32 to 71, and ten students ranging from junior high students to graduate students in college. I asked each of

them the same four questions and recorded their answers. The first question that I asked was: How would you feel if someone copied your work or a paper you wrote? The second question was: Have you ever been caught or accused of plagiarism in any way and if so what was your punishment or if you are a teacher have you ever caught anyone plagiarizing and what did you do about it? The third question: Do you think that plagiarism is being taught in the right way to students? And Finally: Do you think that all forms of plagiarism are wrong whether in be copying word for word, ghostwriting, or any other form you can think of? The answers to these questions were shocking and not at all what I expected, especially from a students viewpoint. Results Through my interviews I found that teachers really stress the idea that if you break my policy or the schools policy on plagiarism that there are no second chances. Dr. Jason Johnson a professor of history at Ohio University said it the best, Any student caught plagiarizing in my class, [there have been many] will receive an immediate F for the course and be excused from the class for the remainder of the quarter. When I then asked him if the students get a chance to explain themselves or if he sits down and shows them what they did wrong, he responded by saying, My students are in college and they should know betterand there are no second chances. Probably the closest answer to lenient that I got was from an English teacher at Prospect High School named Jane Berry. She responded to the question by saying that students who are caught plagiarism will get and explanation of what they did wrong, but she said they would still receive a failing grade for the class. When it came to my student interviews they were very similar to what the professors said. Most of them were very harsh and very unforgiving. I asked one graduate

student at Ohio University studying English what he thought about the punishments being handed down for plagiarism and if he found them to be to strict. Mark Cannon said that students caught plagiarizing should be expelled from the school or university that they attend and should not be given much of a shot at any other school. His reasoning for this was interesting. He said that it has been hammered into our heads for so long that by the time we get to college we should know not to plagiarize and that there is no excuse for it. Another student I interviewed, Mary Schroeder of Illinois State University put forth the idea that all forms of plagiarism are bad, after I asked her my fourth question about plagiarism. She said I believe that all forms of plagiarism deserve the utmost punishment[ranging] from taking someones paper and using it as your own or the idea of ghostwriting. Mary believed that all forms of plagiarism should be equal and she did not seem to understand why the punishments for each type of plagiarism were not the same. Discussion From my research and interviews I expected the students to be very laid back about plagiarism and to be lenient with the punishments that should be handed down. In turn, I expected the Professors to be very uptight and strict about the policies. My predictions were somewhat correct; in the way that the teachers were very strict about their plagiarism policies and that there were no exceptions what so ever. But what really surprised me was the fact that students were also very uptight and not thinking that there should be any leeway for people caught using any form of plagiarism. I believe that the way that these teachers and students see plagiarism needs to change in a way that helps students better understand what plagiarism is. The first thing

that needs to happen is that the schooling system needs to be more open with their policy on plagiarism. I dont mean to say just let students copy other peoples work and for it to be a free for all, but to loosen up the rules a bit. When I say loosen up the rules, I mean that teachers should be accepting that students make mistakes sometimes and that they deserve a chance to explain themselves. In an interview with a student from Palatine High School named Emily Schaeffer, she told me a story of how she got caught plagiarizing her freshman year of high school. What happened was she was given a two paper to write on a book they had read in class, and they were given one week to do it. In that same week her grandmother became very sick and passed away. She did not know what to do about the paper because she was under so much stress, so she copied and pasted a paper from the internet and turned it in. When the teacher found out she received a zero for the paper and failed the class. What the teacher did not let her do was explain herself about why she plagiarized. All the teacher did was enter in the grade and said nothing to the student about it (Shaeffer). I found through my interviews that teachers do not care or do not want to hear a story or an excuse about why you plagiarized. All they care about is that you did it and that its unacceptable. In the case of Emily Shaeffer, if the teacher had given her a chance to explain herself, the teacher probably would have understood. Through my research students usually dont plagiarize on purpose or for no good reason, there is usually an explanation and all the teachers have to do is ask. The next change that needs to occur is the distinction between what is considered plagiarism and what is not considered plagiarism. Some of the key points we need to distinguish between are word for word copying, patchwriting, intertextuality, and ghostwriting. I think that most people can agree that copying something exactly as it is

written is wrong, but is paraphrasing without citing, or the technique of ghostwriting also wrong? From my research I found that most people would consider ghostwriting to be okay, but from my interviews I found that most people said that ghostwriting and intertextuality or paraphrasing are wrong. I believe that this distinction between these elements needs to be made clear. Going back to when I talked about how teachers in schools need to change, well this is one of the parts of their teaching that they need to change. They need to make the clear distinction between which of these they consider to be plagiarism and which they do not. Our society as a whole also needs to look at this problem and decide what they are going to considered plagiarism and what they will not consider plagiarism. Because as of now there is no clear distinction between the types of plagiarism, which in turn is causing students to get into trouble. Today students are simply not getting the correct information about what plagiarism really is and how to avoid it. Schools do not spend enough time on the topic of plagiarism and what it is and what it is considered to be. All that is being said is plagiarism is bad and if you do it you will receive severe punishment. If the writing community is going to make the topic of plagiarism so vague, then the community and it's teachers need to accurately teach what is and isnt plagiarism. Not just tell them it is bad, but actually sit down and explain the different categories of plagiarism and why they are considered to be so bad. A New York Times article written by Trip Gabriel, Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age, discuses this very idea that students do not exactly know what is and is not considered plagiarism. I believe that a majority of the punishments that are handed down to students caught plagiarizing are unfair. This is because we should not be handing down such outrageous punishments to students who really truly do not understand what they are

doing wrong without it even being explained to them. This goes to show that teachers and the writing community need to be more lenient on young writers because some of them have really never been properly taught. Through doing my research and interviews I have come to find many things. One, that most people will agree that all plagiarism is terrible and should never be committed. Two, most people themselves cannot really say what they believe to be plagiarism and what they do not believe plagiarism to be. And three, the way the schooling system is teaching kids about plagiarism is very vague and does not get down to what it really means. As plagiarism becomes more and more of an issue in the writing community, the punishments will also continue to get worse. It is bad enough that a student can get suspended or expelled from a school for plagiarizing, even when they may not have known that it was so wrong. There is no telling what will be next if our society keeps going down this vague road of what plagiarism is. The ideas of patchwriting, intertextuality, and ghostwriting are all considered to be plagiarism if you go by the official rules to an exact T. But this should not be the case anymore. Our society needs to become more open to teaching more about plagiarism rather than always looking for it and looking for an excuse to punish someone for an insufficient mistake. I believe that if this happens the writing community can stop making plagiarism such a big deal and something that is greatly feared but rather an idea that is well know and avoidable.

Works Cited Berry, Jane. Personal Interview. March 1,2012. Cannon, Mark. Personal Interview. February 26, 2012. Howard, Rebecca Moore. Plagiarism, Authorship, and The Academic Death Penalty. College English, Vol. 57, No. 7 (Nov. 1995), pp. 788-806. "Harvard Guide to Using Sources." Harvard Plagiarism Policy. Web. 08 Mar. 2012. Johnson, Jason. Personal Interview. March 1, 2012.

Martin, R.G. Plagiarism and Originality: Some Remedies. The English Journal, Vol. 60, No. 5 (May, 1971), pp. 621-625+628.

Porter, James E. Intertextuality and The Discourse Community. Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 34-47. Print. Posner, Ari. 1988. "The culture of plagiarism." The New Republic, 18 April:19-24. Schroeder, Mary. Personal Inerview. March 5, 2012. Shaeffer, Emily. Personal Interview. March 2, 2012 Trip. Plagiarism lines Blur for Students in digital age. New York Times. August, 1 2010.