by:
  Michael Donnelly,
  Rebecca Ingalls,
  Tracy Ann Morse,
  Joanna Castner, and
  Anne Meade
  Stockdell-Giesler

  Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
   by Joanna Castner Post

As part of our First-Year Writing Committee, I have welcomed the opportunity to think through what has been just a gut-level distaste for a particular tool, Turnitin. Some students in my classes have plagiarized, both purposely and through confusion about the expectations for academic writing. So why wouldn't I welcome a technology that could help me catch the transgressors? The question, for me, led immediately to the answer: I don't want to think of students as "transgressors," and I don't want to develop a pedagogy and consequent class environment built around that view of students. Further, I don't believe that such a pedagogy could hope to address successfully the complexities of plagiarism.

If one accepts postmodern theories of knowledge and authorship, the line between plagiarism and acceptable academic writing is terribly thin and must be enormously confusing for students with even the best of intentions. Composition scholar Rebecca Moore Howard explains this problem well with her concept of patchwriting, which on one end of a continuum she defines as "…rearranging and slightly altering phrases and sentences from a source text" (1999a, p. 87). But Howard argues that patchwriting spans from that end, often characterized by our summarizing efforts as we try to make sense of difficult texts, to sophisticated and acceptable academic writing that is actually a complex soup of others' words meshed with our own.

Irene Clark quotes Helen Keller in what could be seen as a nice metaphor for understanding this latter end of the continuum for patchwriting:

It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read because what I read becomes the very substance and text of my mind. Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew (1999, p. 166).

In Standing in the Shadows of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators, Howard expands on the concept of patchwriting by arguing that it is the method by which we become scholars. It is a form of mimesis, and by placing patchwriting in the category of plagiarism we place a barrier in the way of our students becoming scholars. She explains:

But there was something wrong with my teaching. My zeal to socialize them into the avowed conventions of academic writing was actually preventing their learning. Patchwriting was for them-as it is for us all-a primary means of understanding difficult texts, of expanding one's lexical, stylistic, and conceptual repertoires, of finding and trying out new voices in which to speak (p. xviii).

Mike Rose (1989), in Lives on the Boundary, is another scholar who has identified difficulty in comprehending texts as a primary reason behind unsophisticated patchwriting, and both Howard and Rose have very useful ideas for helping students become better readers. Using Turnitin as a tool for policing students would simply bypass any reading problems and lead too hastily to punishment.

• Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
• Flying, Finally
• The Role of the WPA
• The Problems with PDS
• May the Conversation Continue...
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
• The Devaluing of Growth?
• A Lack of Ethics
• An Ethos of Academic Integrity
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
• The Concept of Intellectual Property
• Roots of Consent
• Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
• Responsibility for Writing
• A Focus on Revision
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
• Skill and Creativity
• Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
• A Stimulus to Creativity
• Engagement and Success
• Conclusion
• References
• print version