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

  Engagement and Success

However, the position that students may unintentionally plagiarize as they learn to work through and understand difficult texts, engage them in substantive ways, and then construct their own writing about them does not address the other extreme, the unethical intent to plagiarize.

For example, many would argue that students who download papers wholesale from the Internet demonstrate dishonesty, regardless of the causes for such an action, and that they must be punished. My argument, though, is that intent should not change our pedagogical response. Students will plagiarize.

Let's use the short time we have with them to address the problems leading to plagiarism rather than using it to police them and name them transgressor right from the start. Let's focus on helping students learn what it means to engage with their sources. Let's work with them through the entire writing process, which includes making sure they are learning effective reading strategies. Let's teach engagement with sources through class discussion, reading responses, comments on drafts that point to the ways they need to engage more deeply, and final comments on products that model engagement by engaging them as writers themselves.

Any downloaded draft, then, would just become part of the invention stages of a writing project. If teachers don't allow students to shirk engagement, the extreme forms of plagiarism will disappear, and as students engage sources more and more, the lesser forms of it will be transformed into acceptable, sophisticated patchwriting.

• Introduction
  Michael Donnelly
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
  Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
  Rebecca Ingalls
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
  Tracy Ann Morse
• Conclusion

• 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