Werken Wel And Hastily: Plagiarizing and Research

Reading over some of my recent lamentations about student writing, I thought it was probably time to offer my drip-drip into the lake of observations about the real shape of writing in the 21st century.

Today's hackneyed remark: Plagiarism has little meaning in the Internet Age.

Feel free to quote me on this.  Without attribution.

A student in my class this morning was not precisely proud of his rough draft, a research paper on boxing that owes every syllable to one excellent source.

So far, it's a three page "book" report on a web-source.

This is delicate for the teacher.  Brought up as I was on Original Thought and a clear separation of my own ideas from those of my sources, my impulse is to rage that all he's done is cut and paste and add an "According to" every five sentences or so.

But I wanted him to write a section on the history of boxing.   He's found a terrific source that tells him about it.  Why should he gild the lily? 

But I'm writing this because of a little spasm we had in our conversation.  "What about the Queensbury Rules?" I asked him.  "I don't see that in your history."

"The what?"

"Queensbury Rules.  The British codes and rules for boxing."

There was a sort of pause.  He said, "You know a lot about boxing."

And it occurred to me that the difference between his generation and mine is that we read to improve our knowledge, his generation reads to improve their data-range.

And so it's not really "plagiarism" to him, and while I will continue to hammer home the necessity of proper citation, I'm sympathetic with him and his classmates.  The research paper was a form developed when research was a real labor, a way of acquiring knowledge.  Because the tools and mechanics were slow, sluggish, and difficult, we were essentially tracing the growth of our own minds on a topic.

Now the tools are slick, rapid, and almost independent of the human researcher.  Now, the research paper is merely compiling.  No real learning has to take place: indeed, it's perfectly possible to write a research paper of which the student-writer has only read a few lines.

"Ther n' is no werkman whatever he be, / That may both werken wel and hastily," says Chaucer's Merchant.  And there is no workman-student who does not now work right hastily: Google's well into fifth gear and climbing and not likely to slow down.  My plagiarism detector has its work cut out for it, but the real trouble is to get a mind in overdrive to see why it might not be best for it to fly past these green pastures of learning instead of stopping to make things grow.

Why should they?  

I'm not sure I really have an answer to that question, except that those who really know things instead of just knowing how to find them out make better dates.

Update on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 6:22PM by Otter

I posted this blog entry in the morning.  By dinner time, I was struggling with a paper on gas prices that inexplicably dropped into the first person:

Even though Exxon used the method of rack and zone pricing, but we do not own ninety five percent of our stations and therefore, the local business owners are the last ones that set the prices based on local market conditions.

Never mind the overt grammar errors or that the paper never explains rack and zone pricing.  The reference to "our stations" sent me to the web, where I found the source:

How are pump prices set at Exxon and Mobil stations? We don’t own 95 percent of them, and therefore we don’t set the price.   Local stations are often owned by a businessman or businesswoman in your community, and they set their own prices based on local market conditions. 

And the student?  Who owns fewer than 5% of ExxonMobil's stations?

Well, doubtless he figures he was just presenting good clean information right from the source.  The most authoritative source on big oil financing would of course be a big oil website.  Q.E.D.

Unless you count the energy required to teach North Americans.