Copyright and Plageriasm

Both copyright and plagiarism are one of the controversial issues that face intellectuals in universities, especially teachers of 101 courses. The problem is that publishers put restrictions on the amount of material researchers can use, which constitutes a source of difficulty and challenge for students who are always required to do research and make response papers for the material they take in their classes. These students will also be confronted with the fact that they should sift other sources to build their arguments and provide a sophisticated discourse that meets the requirements of academic standards, as they believe. DeVoss and Rosati argue that

they feel that assembling sources, citations, and quotes is the primary goal of writing a paper—and that their original ideas are secondary…Students may stumble toward plagiarism when they fail to cite properly because they don’t entirely understand the point or argument of a primary work, or in a struggle to define what “common knowledge” means, they struggle to identify which information merits a citation.

In spite of all what was said in the readings and in spite of the fact that writing occurs in a discourse the elements of which are articulated in a way that makes it possible that each element affects it, I do believe that out teaching practices inside classrooms exacerbate plagiarism and copyright problems that our students encounter.

As teachers, we always confuse our students with the myth of academic discourse vs. home discourse. We always tell them that they should use a sophisticated language, one that they do not use in their daily home discourse. This split, in my point of view, drives students to believe that their lexical repertory and rhetorical power are vulgar and feeble and that they should go through other sources to ameliorate their writing. In so doing, students will fall victims of a cut/paste process by borrowing phrases, sentences and sometimes paragraphs to meet the requirements. In fact, composition teachers should understand that in both discourses (home and academic) students can engage in conversations by posing arguments and counterarguments and providing evidences.

In addition, the type of assignments that we give to our students may negatively contribute to the problem. Although writing is a creative process in which people unleash their imagination and ideas, teachers tend to ask students to write papers by answering one or two questions, which, I think, restrict students’ imaginative and speculative abilities. Reluctantly students will try to visit websites and other sources to do the assignments, which will make them commit the same mistake (plagiarism and violating copyright laws) It will be more practical for teachers to engage students in symbolic-analytic work which should push students to sort and synthesize information(Johnson-Eilola).

Finally, since our teaching practices are part of writing, we need to change them to cope with our postmodern era and our technological advancement. As teachers of composition, we should criticize and correct ourselves before we blame our economical and ideological practices.

Power and Education

A Response to Selfe

In her article the Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing, Selfe argues that “the relationship between aurality ( visual modality) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodel rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning”(616). I totally support her contention for two reasons. First, instructors should use the best possible means that will help them convey their meanings and that will push their students to receive these meanings as precisely and clearly as possible. Second, Speaking and writing are both productive skills in which one person encodes a signal and two or more people decode them. So, the only difference between the two skills is in the form of the encoding/decoding process. In writing people encode and decode letters and make use of punctuation marks while, in speaking, they send sounds and harness acoustic features such as rhythm and intonation.

The most important question is: does this difference matter in Composition ? The answer is no, of course. It only does in Semantics and Phonology. But, rhetorically speaking, I do not see any difference between the two skills when it comes to Composition. In both skills, people can pose arguments and support or refute them with evidences. They can also think, analyze and pass judgments. And this is what should matter the most in Writing classes. And this is what we should center our attention on. As rhetoricians and Composition teachers, we need to do our best to find a way by which we can interweave both skills in a comprehensive writing syllabus.

However, in spite of my support for the implementation of aural and visual activities in our classrooms, they are two-edged weapons. It is not a secret that we need to use these activities in order to communicate particular messages (meanings) to our students and that the arrival of these messages at the destination without any change or distortion is far reaching. Meaning is socially constructed.“ The collective mind of a society will determine its goals and its position in this world, which will be reflected on its behavior, thinking and its way of dealing with others and push it to create its own distinctive identity and frame it as ideologies” ( Anwr Adam, from a response essay prepared for 511). The implication of this quotation in multi-cultural Composition classrooms is that we may use aural or visual activities that carry specific meanings students from different cultures can not grasp. And this will hinder the learning process for which these activities have been used.