(See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 in the series.)

I believe that part of the reasons students end up plagiarizing, either inadvertently or otherwise, is that they underestimate the time it takes to write. This is because they think that writing only occurs when they are actually putting words on paper or typing on a keyboard.

But writing involves really three phases: prewriting, writing, and post-writing.

Pre-writing probably takes the most time and often does not involve the physical act of writing at all. This is the time when the author is mulling things over in his mind, sorting ideas out, trying to find the main point he is trying to make, asking what kinds of evidence is necessary and what documents should be read for background, and seeking out those sources of information. It also involves (for some) sketching out an outline and making rough notes. It is during this process of slow digestion that you start the important process of synthesizing the ideas that you have got from many sources and making something of your own.
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(See part 1, part 2, and part 3 in the series.)

So why do people end up sometimes plagiarizing? There are many reasons. Apart from the few who deliberately set out to do it because they are too lazy to do any actual writing of their own and lack any compunction about plagiarizing, I believe most end up doing it out of fear that they expected to say something that is interesting, original, and well written, usually (in the case of classroom assignments) about topics that they have little or no interest in.

This is a highly inflated and unrealistic expectation. I doubt that more than a few college or high school teacher really expect a high level of originality in response to classroom assignments, though that does not mean one should not try to achieve it.

A misplaced emphasis on originality creates unrealistic expectations that can cause insecure writers to plagiarize. I think that students who end up plagiarizing make the mistake of thinking that they must start by coming up with an original idea. Few people (let alone students who usually have very little writing experience) can reach such a high standard of originality. This is why they immediately hit a wall, lose a lot of time trying to get an idea, and in desperation end up plagiarizing by finding others who have said something interesting or relevant and “borrowing” their work. But since they want the reader to think that they have done the writing, they sometimes hide the borrowing by means of the ‘pointless paraphrase’ I wrote about previously.

Originality in ideas is often something that emerges from the writing and is not prior to the writing. A blindingly original idea may sometimes strike you, but this will be rare even for the most gifted and original writers. Instead, what you will usually find is a kind of incremental originality that emerges naturally out of the act of writing, where you are seemingly doing the mundane task of putting together a clear piece of writing using other people’s (cited) ideas. If you are writing about things that interest you, then you will be surprised to find that the very act of writing brings about something original, where you discover new relationships between old ideas.

As an instructor, what I am really looking for in student writing is something that just meets the single criterion of being well written. As for being interesting, all I want is to see that at least the writer is interested in the topic, and the evidence for that takes the form of the writer making the effort to try and convince the reader of the writer’s point of view. This seems like a modest goal but if followed can lead to pretty good writing.

In my experience, the most important thing is for writers to be interested enough in the topic that they want to say something about it, so the first condition for good writing is that the writer must care about the topic. The second condition is that the writer cares enough about it to want to make the reader care too. Once these two factors are in place, originality (to a greater or lesser degree) follows almost automatically from them.

It took me a long time to understand this. I had never written much in the earlier stages of my career (apart from scientific papers) because I was waiting for great new ideas to strike me, ideas that never came. But there came a time when I felt that a topic I cared a lot about (the nature of science) was one in which the point of view I held was not being articulated clearly enough by others. I began writing about it, not because I had an original idea, but because I felt a need to synthesize the ideas of many others into a simpler, more clearly articulated, position that I felt was missing from the discussion. In the process of creating that synthesis, some papers and my first book Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs emerged. What turned out to be original (at least slightly) in them was the application of the ideas of certain classical philosophers and historians of science to the contemporary science-religion debate, something that I had not had in mind when I started writing. That feature emerged from the writing.

My second book The Achievement gap in US education: Canaries in the mine followed that same pattern. I was very concerned about what I felt were great misunderstandings about the causes of the achievement gap between black and white students in the US and how to deal with it. I felt that my experience and interests in science and education and politics and learning theory put me in a good position where I could bring ideas from these areas together. I did not have anything really original in mind when I started writing but whatever is original in the book emerged from the act of writing, the attempt to create a synthesis.

The same applies to these blog entries. I write about the things I care about, trying to make my point clear, without seeking to be original. After all, who can come up with original ideas five times per week? But very often I find that I have written things that I had not thought about prior to the writing.

To be continued. . .

POST SCRIPT: Is there no end to the deception?

One of the amazing things about they current administration is how brazen they are about misleading the public. The latest is that President Bush rushed to declare that “We have found [Iraq’s] weapons of mass destruction” in the form of mobile biological weapons laboratories, even while some intelligence investigators were finding that there was nothing to that charge.

The defense being offered by the administration’s spokespersons that these negative findings had not reached the president makes no sense. Before making a serious charge, it is the President and his staff’s responsibility to check what information is being gathered and processed. To shoot off his mouth when there was no urgency to do so is to be irresponsible at best and deceitful at worst.

Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly is maintaining a list of the more egregious examples of things the administration knew were not true or for which there were serious doubts, but went ahead and declared them as ‘facts’ anyway, to justify decisions that they had already made about attacking Iraq.

He is up to #8 and there is no reason to think that the list will not keep growing.

(See part 1 and part 2 in the series.)

Just last week, it was reported that twenty one Ohio University engineering graduates had plagiarized their master’s theses. Why would they do that?

I think it is rare that people deliberately set out to use other people’s words and ideas while hiding the source. Timothy Noah in his Chatterbox column has a good article in Slate where he points to Harvard’s guidelines to students which state that unintentional plagiarism is a frequent culprit:

Most often . . . the plagiarist has started out with good intentions but hasn’t left enough time to do the reading and thinking that the assignment requires, has become desperate, and just wants the whole thing done with. At this point, in one common scenario, the student gets careless while taking notes on a source or incorporating notes into a draft, so the source’s words and ideas blur into those of the student.

But lack of intent is not a valid defense against the charge of plagiarism. That has not prevented even eminent scholars like Doris Kearns Goodwin from trying to invoke it. But as Noah writes, the American Historical Association’s (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) statement on plagiarism is quite clear on this point:
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In the previous post on this topic, I discussed the plagiarism case of Ben Domenech, who had lifted entire chunks of other people’s writings and had passed them off as his own.

How could he have done such a thing? After all, all high school and college students get the standard lecture on plagiarism and why it is bad. And even though Domenech was home schooled, it seems unlikely that he thought this was acceptable practice. When he was confronted with his plagiarism, his defense was not one of surprise that it was considered wrong but merely that he had been ‘young’ when he did it or that he had got permission from the author to use their words or that the offending words had been inserted by his editors.

The cautionary lectures that students receive about plagiarism are usually cast in a moralistic way, that plagiarism is a form of stealing, that taking someone else’s words or ideas without proper attribution is as morally reprehensible as taking their money.

What is often overlooked in this kind of approach is that there are many other reasons why writers and academics cite other people’s works when appropriate. By focusing too much on this stealing aspect, we tend to not give students an important insight into how scholarship and research works.

Russ Hunt at St. Thomas University argues that writers cite others for a whole complex of reasons that have little to do with avoiding charges of plagiarism:

[P]ublished scholarly literature is full of examples of writers using the texts, words and ideas of others to serve their own immediate purposes. Here’s an example of the way two researchers opened their discussion of the context of their work in 1984:

To say that listeners attempt to construct points is not, however, to make clear just what sort of thing a ‘point’ actually is. Despite recent interest in the pragmatics of oral stories (Polanyi 1979, 1982; Robinson 1981), conversations (Schank et al. 1982), and narrative discourse generally (Prince 1983), definitions of point are hard to come by. Those that do exist are usually couched in negative terms: apparently it is easier to indicate what a point is not than to be clear about what it is. Perhaps the most memorable (negative) definition of point was that of Labov (1972: 366), who observed that a narrative without one is met with the “withering” rejoinder, “So what?” (Vipond & Hunt, 1984)

It is clear here that the motives of the writers do not include prevention of charges of plagiarism; moreover, it’s equally clear that they are not. . .attempting to “cite every piece of information that is not a) the result of your own research, or b) common knowledge.” What they are doing is more complex. The bouquet of citations offered in this paragraph is informing the reader that the writers know, and are comfortable with, the literature their article is addressing; they are moving to place their argument in an already existing written conversation about the pragmatics of stories; they are advertising to the readers of their article, likely to be interested in psychology or literature, that there is an area of inquiry — the sociology of discourse — that is relevant to studies in the psychology of literature; and they are establishing a tone of comfortable authority in that conversation by the acknowledgement of Labov’s contribution and by using his language –“withering” is picked out of Labov’s article because it is often cited as conveying the power of pointlessness to humiliate (I believe I speak with some authority for the authors’ motives, since I was one of them).

Scholars — writers generally — use citations for many things: they establish their own bona fides and currency, they advertise their alliances, they bring work to the attention of their reader, they assert ties of collegiality, they exemplify contending positions or define nuances of difference among competing theories or ideas. They do not use them to defend themselves against potential allegations of plagiarism.

The clearest difference between the way undergraduate students, writing essays, cite and quote and the way scholars do it in public is this: typically, the scholars are achieving something positive; the students are avoiding something negative. (my italics)

I think that Hunt has hit exactly the right note.

When you cite the works of others, you are strengthening your own argument because you are making them (and their allies) into your allies, and people who challenge what you say have to take on this entire army. When you cite reputable sources or credible authorities for facts or ideas, you become more credible because you are no longer alone and thus not easily dismissed, even if you personally are not famous or a recognized authority.

To be continued. . .

POST SCRIPT: It’s now Daylight Saving Time. Do you know where your spiritual plane is?

It seems like idiotic statements attributing natural events to supernatural causes are not restricted to Christian radical clerics like Pat Robertson. Some Sri Lankan Buddhist clergy are challenging him for the title of Religious Doofus.

Since Sri Lanka sits very close to the equator, the length of the day is the same all year round, not requiring the ‘spring-forward-fall-back’ biannual adjusting of the US. Sri Lankan time used to be 5.5 hours ahead of Universal Time (UT) but in 1996 the government made a one-time shift it to 6.5 hours in order to have sunset arrive later and save energy. But the influential Buddhist clergy were not happy with the change. As a compromise, the clocks were then again adjusted to make it just 6.0 ahead of UT as a compromise. Now the government is thinking of going back to the original 5.5. hours.

Some of the country’s Buddhist clergy are rejoicing at the prospect of a change because they say Sri Lanka’s “old” time fitted better with their rituals.

They believe a decade living in the “wrong” time has upset the country’s natural order with terrible effect.

The Venerable Gnanawimala says the change moved the country to a spiritual plane 500 miles east of where it should be.

“After this change I feel that many troubles have been caused to Sri Lanka. Tsunamis and other natural disasters have been taking place,” he says.

This is what happens when you mix religion and the state. You now have to worry about what your actions are doing to the longitudinal coordinates of your nation’s spiritual plane.

If you blinked a couple of weeks ago, you might have missed the meteor that was the rise and fall of the career of Ben Domenech as a blogger for WashingtonPost.com.

This online version of the newspaper is apparently managed independently of the print edition and has its own Executive Editor Jim Brady. For reasons that are not wholly clear, Brady decided that he needed to hire a “conservative” blogger for the website.

The problem with this rationale for the hiring was that no “liberal” counterpart blogger existed at the paper. They did have a popular blogger in Dan Froomkin, someone with a journalistic background, who wrote about politics for the Post and who had on occasion been critical of the Bush White House. As I have written earlier, Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that anything but unswavering loyalty to Bush has become the basis for identifying someone as liberal, and maybe Brady had internalized this critique, prompting him to hire someone who could be counted upon to support Bush in all his actions.

For reasons that are even more obscure, rather than choose someone who had serious journalistic credentials for this new column, Brady selected the untested 24-year old Ben Domenech. It is true that Domenech was something of a boy wonder, at least on paper. He had been home-schooled by his affluent and well-connected Republican family. He then went to William and Mary and wrote for their student newspaper The Flat Hat. He dropped out of college before graduating and co-founded a conservative website called Redstate, where he wrote under the pseudonym Augustine.

His father was a Bush political appointee and his new online column for the Washington Post (called Red America) said in its inaugural posting on March 21 that young Ben “was sworn in as the youngest political appointee of President George W. Bush. Following a year as a speechwriter for HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and two as the chief speechwriter for Texas Senator John Cornyn, Ben is now a book editor for Regnery Publishing, where he has edited multiple bestsellers and books by Michelle Malkin, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Hugh Hewitt.”

Not bad for a 24-year old without a college degree. And his bio lists even more accomplishments. But getting his own column in WashingtonPost.com was the peak. Soon after that things started going downhill very rapidly.

His decline began when bloggers looked into his writings and found that, as Augustine, he had written a column of the day of Coretta Scott King’s funeral calling her a Communist. This annoyed a lot of people who then started looking more closely at his other writings. It was then that someone discovered that he had plagiarized. And the plagiarism was not subtle. Take for example this excerpt from his review of the film Bringing out the Dead.

Instead of allowing for the incredible nuances that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him.

But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he’s trying to revive Mary’s father, the man’s family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, “Do you have any music?”

Now compare it with an earlier review posted on Salon.com,

Instead of allowing for the incredible nuance that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him. . . But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he’s trying to revive Mary’s father, the man’s family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, “Do you have any music?”

Or this sampling from P. J. O’Rourke’s book Modern Manners, which also found its way into Domenech’s columns:

O’Rourke, p.176: Office Christmas parties • Wine-tasting parties • Book-publishing parties • Parties with themes, such as “Las Vegas Nite” or “Waikiki Whoopee” • Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket

BenDom: Christmas parties. Wine tasting parties. Book publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as “Las Vegas Nite” or “Waikiki Whoopee.” Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.

O’Rourke: It’s not a real party if it doesn’t end in an orgy or a food fight. • All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.

BenDom: It’s not a real party if it doesn’t end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.

These are not the kinds of accidental plagiarisms that anyone can fall prey to, where a turn of phrase that appealed to you when you read it a long time ago comes out of you when you are writing and you do not remember that you got it from someone else. These examples are undoubtedly deliberate cut-and-paste jobs.

Once the charges of plagiarism were seen to have some credibility, many people went to Google and the floodgates were opened, Kaloogian-style, with bloggers all over poring over his writings. Within the space of three days a torrent of further examples of plagiarism poured out. These new allegations dated back to his writings at his college newspaper and then later for National Review Online, and Domenech was found to have lifted material from Salon and even from National Review Online, the latter being the same publication for which he was writing, which adds the sin of ingratitude to the dishonesty.

On March 24, just three days after starting his Washington Post column, Ben Domenech resigned under pressure. Soon after, he also resigned as book editor at Regnery.

What can we learn from this? One lesson seemingly is that people can get away with plagiarism for a short while, especially if they are writing in obscurity for little known publications. While he was writing for his college newspaper and even for his own website, no one cared to closely look into his work. Even his future employers at WanshintonPost.com did not seem to have checked him out carefully. Apparently his well-connected family and sterling Bush loyalty was enough to satisfy them that he was a good addition to their masthead.

But as soon as a writer becomes high profile, the chances are very high these days that any plagiarism will come to light.

At one level, this is a familiar cautionary tale to everyone to cite other people’s work when using it. For us in the academic world, where plagiarism is a big no-no, the reasons for citing are not just there are high penalties if you get caught not doing it. The more important reasons arise from the very nature of scholarly academic activity, which I shall look at in a future posting.

To be continued. . .