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.

What's Composing

As I said in class, my experience with technology in teaching was so limited. I can say that the only course I encountered technology in was Rhetoric of Contact Zone last Semester, which provided me with a social space in which I could interact with my classmates in a “home-academic” discourse. It was academic in the sense that I was responding to academic issues that we went through in the syllabus and it was home-like in the sense that I did not feel the stress and formality of the classroom. I often blogged while I was sprawling out on the bed. I was not bound up with time and place and did not care about my style and registers. I always thought of Dr. Barbara as a host, her website as her house, we as her guests and our blogs as our conversation.

Doubtless this feeling of informality will help our students write in a better way. I always say that our students socially interact with people in a successful way. They can always talk about politics, economy and social practices. They can pose arguments, support them with evidences, refute counterarguments and reconcile disputes with others. However, when it comes to writing, they fail to do all that. The reason, in my point of view, is that our classical classrooms ( those without technology) instill in our students’ minds the idea that writing is another realm with different components and that it does not share with speaking any characteristics. And this is a fallacy. Both speaking and writing have the same components: the sender (speaker or writer), receiver ( listener or reader), and a message ( letters or sounds). However, when our students write, they do believe that there is no one there to argue with or to convince. They do not know that their ideas can be formulated in sounds or letters. In a social place like Rhetoric of Contact Zone, students will realize that their peers have access to their writing and can evaluate them, which can turn the writing process into a conversation in students’ eyes.

I totally disagree with Wysocki et al when they define new media texts as texts “designed so that its materiality is not effaced”. We need to know that not all people see the values and materiality a text embodies. Aristotle argues that this world consists of appearances seen in different ways. Each person tries to discover a rupture in an appearance and connect it to the whole. For example, since a piece of composition is an appearance, readers will understand it differently according to their political, economical and social backgrounds. Take Shakespeare’s work The Tempest as an example; Hundreds of articles and papers have been written to interpret it.

Blog Post 1

I taught writing for both high school and college for five years. From this range of experience I can tell that teaching writing is a complicated process that goes beyond the educational hierarchy ( teacher, student and syllabus). My students came to my class with different social practices and social forces. Some were students from the middle class who were taught in good schools and received better teaching while the others came from the working class with less care and privilege. This huge gap between the two classes helped the middle class students to perform better, which made me feel that it was unfair to evaluate them in the same way. No way of comparison. So, I had to look for a way by which I could judge their performances without bias.

The best way I found was to train all the students to write their own home discourses and to avoid the academic discourse that gave the middle class students more privilege. The results were amazing. Most of the students could write a one-page argumentative essay with differently interwoven arguments and different registers and styles. The aim has been achieved since most of the students could write a simple piece of composition.

The skill I think our students should have is freeing themselves from the “academic discourse” complex. The academic discourse that we need our students to learn is amorphous. I remember that when I was in high school, I noticed that every author had his own discourse, which made me wonder which one to follow, which one to learn. Yancey’s idea that writing is a social activity is the best way to help our students overcome their complex. By writing through social networking, students will be able to realize that writing is a social activity that requires them to develop their own discourses.