Below is an English Professor's take on plagiarism. It is from the
Chronical of High Ed.
Jeff Nagelbush
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ferris State University
A glance at the March issue of "College English":
Why plagiarism is a sexist term
English professors are of two minds about plagiarism. They
create regulations that punish students for borrowing language
from another text, yet agree that no writing is fully original.
Rebecca Moore Howard, an associate professor of writing and
rhetoric at Syracuse University, discusses the implications of
this conceptual blurring in two forthcoming scholarly books. In
a new piece, she suggests that scholars discard the term
plagiarism altogether, in large part because efforts to regulate
against it run counter to the political aims of their teaching.
"To adjudicate plagiarism in these circumstances is to work
against the liberatory, democratic, civic, and critical
pedagogies that prevail in English studies," she writes. At
heart, Ms. Howard's problem is that plagiarism depends on
"gendered metaphors of authorship" that equate originality with
masculinity and diminish the benefits of collaboration, a
strategy often employed by women writers. These metaphors, which
Ms. Howard locates in writing guides new and old, describe
plagiarism as a kind of sexual disease that threatens the male
writer and his work. Or they go further, and turn the stealing
of language into a kind of rape, in which the author of the
original text, and his readers, are violated. In all of these
cases, "plagiarism represents authorship run amok ... and thus
incites gender hysteria in the community in which it occurs,"
she writes. As an antidote, Ms. Howard suggests replacing the
term plagiarism with "more specific, less culturally burdened
terms" like "fraud," "excessive repetition," or "insufficient
citation." Students can and should find their grades lowered, or
even be flunked, for these offenses. But Ms. Howard calls on
fellow scholars to embark on the "revisionary/revolutionary"
task of making room for less novelty. "Let's get out of the
business of valorizing an elusive originality, criminalizing
imitation, and reinforcing prejudices of gender and sexual
preference," she concludes. "Let's leave sexual work out of
textual work." The article is not available online, but
information about the journal may be found at
http://www.ncte.org/ce/
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