The following are some thoughts for a presentation I and a colleague did about plagiarism for our university’s professional development. We wanted, through this presentation, to highlight our experiences as composition teachers with over 30 years of combined experience and how we need to, across disciplines, think about plagiarism. This is not exhaustive, and we do not deal with AI. However, we do think this serves as a starting point for broader discussions.
During Kevin Smith’s classic film Clerks, Dante and Randal sit around the Quick Stop debating the victims of the Rebel Alliance destroying the Galactic Empire’s Death Stars. Randal points out that the first Death Star “was completed and fully operational before the Rebels destroyed it.” Dante quickly retorts, “Luke blew it up. Give credit where it’s due.” Randal then mentions the destruction of the not-yet-completed Death Star and Dante again replies by giving credit to the individual who provided the fatal blow. He says, “Compliments of Lando Calrissian.”
Dante’s responses to Randall provide an entry point into our discussions about plagiarism. Even though his responses serve merely as a corrective to Randal’s broad assertions of the “Rebels” destroying the Death Stars, Dante’s addition of “[g]ive credit where it’s due” gets to the heart of the discussion because at its core, plagiarism is the taking and use of someone else’s ideas, thoughts, or words and passing them off as one’s own without attribution or credit.
While we can all agree that we want to make sure that students learn how to attribute the ideas and words that they incorporate into their work, we must also remember that all of us bring a multitude of different ideas to our work, ideas culled from a myriad of different sources. Our lives are essentially one large extension of Kenneth Burke’s “parlor metaphor” where when we enter a room the individuals are conversing about a topic, and we join in the conversation. Some of the individuals leave, and others enter. Yet, the conversation continues. When we leave, even more people enter, but the conversation continues, moving forward, always there. The conversation builds on what came before it, and we work to attribute the origins of ideas and words to those who have exited the parlor, but sometimes those ideas become a part of ourselves, transformed into us.
In this manner, we have imbibed the ideas and words. We have also taken part in rhetorical imitation, a tool in rhetoric where one models their work after another. Quintilian, in Institutes of Oratory, points out why imitation is important in invention. He writes, “Our minds must be directed to the imitation of all [the artists’] excellences, for it cannot be doubted that a great portion of art consists in imitation, since, though to invent was first in order of time and holds the first place in merit, it is of advantage to copy what has been invented with success.” While Quintilian argues for the benefits of imitation, he also points out its limitations because it does not move knowledge or art forward. He continues, “Undoubtedly, then, imitation is not sufficient of itself, if for no other reason than that it is the mark of an indolent nature to rest satisfied with what has been invented by others. For what would have been the case if, in those times which were without any models, humans had thought that they were not to execute or imagine anything but what they already knew? Assuredly nothing would have been invented.”
What Quintilian and Burke both note is the collaborative nature of the invention of knowledge through conversation with those who came before, those who walk the ground with us, and those who come after us. This idea of collaboration butts up against the idea of individual genius, the thought that knowledge and works or art arise from sole individuals toiling alone in a cloistered space, devoid of any contact with others. As educators, we know that this has never been the case. Individuals always converse with others, formulating and thinking about ideas and their creation in relation to what has come before them.
In the ninth edition of the Bedford Handbook for Writers, Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers define plagiarism in the following manner:
In general, these three acts are considered plagiarism: (1) failing to cite quotations and borrowed ideas, (2) failing to enclose borrowed language in quotation marks, and (3) failing to put summaries and paraphrases in your own words. Definitions of plagiarism may vary; it’s a good idea to find out how your school defines academic dishonesty. (565)
Rebecca Moore Howard begins “A Plagiarism Pentimento” with an earlier definition of plagiarism that Hacker provided in a previous edition of a Bedford Handbook for Writers. In that definition, Hacker provides “[t]wo different acts” that we should consider plagiarism. They include the use of other’s words, ideas, and thoughts without documentation, the definition we typically think about. Along with this, Hacker argues that the second act is “documenting the source but paraphrasing the source’s language too closely, without using quotation marks to indicate that words and phrases have been borrowed” (507).
Howard points out that Hacker and Sommer’s definition of plagiarism has issues because when we adhere, strictly, to these definitions “we persecute students for crimes they did not commit” (233). If we use the language of criminality — stealing, theft, falsifying, etc. — why do we use the word “homage” when it comes to someone like Quentin Tarantino referencing shots like the dance scene in Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ in his own film Pulp Fiction? Or, why do we use the word “sample” when Kendrick Lamar uses Debbie Deb’s 1983 song “When I Hear the Music” in his 2024 song “Squabble Up”? Or, why do we use the word “allusion” when Frederick Douglass quotes, without attribution, Mark Antony’s speech in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when Antony says, “The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones”?
Rather than presenting students as criminals who have committed crimes by stealing words and ideas, we need to work with them during their early, groping stages of their learning process as they come into contact with new academic language and ideas that they must, when we task them to do so, manipulate into a product that we, as the arbiter of knowledge in the classroom, judge them, holding their success in the pens or keyboards we use to critique their work. Howard argues that we should work with students on navigating these news spaces and provide them with instruction on what she calls “patchwriting.” Howard defines patchwriting as “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes” (233). She argues that when we ignore processes such as patchwriting “we fail to support our students in their efforts to assimilate the constructs of unfamiliar discourse” (233). This does not diminish the need for the attribution of sources — including quoting, footnotes, bibliography, and other items. Rather, it means that we work with students, instead of immediately penalizing them, in grasping the information — language, theories, ideas — and helping them relate that information into their own ideas for the products they produce for our courses.
When we focus on “attribution,” we police students. We don’t teach them because we turn the course into a game of cat and mouse where we’re the cat who must catch the mouse when it attempts to steal the cheese. We teach students to fear us, to fear the information, to take shortcuts because they do not totally grasp the information. This method doesn’t serve our students or us. It only serves to reinforce what Paulo Freire calls the “banking” system of education where students become the mere receptacles of information — flash card terms, equations, and ideas — without critically engaging with the material. We must provide space for students to engage with difficult material and to not be afraid of failure and invention. When they have fear, they do not becoming inquiring students; rather, they become cowering mice fleeing from the ferocious cat that seeks to devour them. As Freire writes, “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (72).
In her 2000 essay “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism,” which appeared in College English, Howard proposes, based on her own research and experience as a professor of composition “that we in English Studies discard the term plagiarism altogether” (475). As an educator with twenty years in higher education, I concur with Howard that we need to do away with the term plagiarism because that term and the policies we have for that term, as Howard points out, removes the “actual authors’ intentions” from the equation, turning the “gotcha” moment of plagiarism into an ethical discussion that positions the author in a negative framework (475). When we think about plagiarism “as a purely textual issue,” we classify the author, if they plagiarize, as “unethical or ignorant of citation conventions,” and this “ethical paradigm” causes us to position the author as willfully choosing to copy text or ideas without attribution, thus criminalizing them without even questioning their intent or ability to manipulate the information (486).
We need to remember that when students enter into our classrooms they must learn a new language, a new way to think, and a new way to relate the information they acquire to their own lives and to communicate it to others. As educators, our role is to foster their acquisition of this knowledge and skills. Our role is to shepherd them, not chase them, through the field. Part of that shepherding is allowing them to struggle with the things they learn and how to communicate that information to others in whatever medium they so choose. They will make mistakes, using ideas and sources without attribution, but when those mistakes occur as part of the learning process, not as part of a concerted effort to skirt working, then our job is to correct, not to punish with impunity.
How many of us can list, in detail, the people, sources, and things that have had a hand in constructing our intellectual thought? If we cannot do that, then are we not, ourselves, guilty of plagiarism and worthy of punishment? Life is learning. Life is taking in information and having it become a part of ourselves. It is about the parlor. It is about imitation. It is about homage. It is about sampling. It is about allusions. It is about partaking in the continuation of knowledge and the creation of knowledge. When we position our classrooms as us against the students, as a game where we try to “catch” them in the act, then we hinder this process because we stifle our students’ abilities to become active participants with us, confining them to subservience beneath us.
WORKS CITED
Hacker, Diana and Nancy Summers. Bedford Handbook for Writers, Ninth Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. “A Plagiarism Pentimento.” Journal of Teaching Writing, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1992.
— -. “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” College English. March 2000.
Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory. Ed. Lee Honeycutt. Trans. John Selby Watson. 2006. Iowa State. 2 Feb. 2025.<http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/quintilian/ >.
Interminable Rambling 
