Cut-and-paste in 101

There is a fine and fuzzy line between original writing and plagiarism. Since I am a writer (by my own definition) I should know. I have to try to do this once a week and do it all by myself—which I do, by the way, I think. Most of you know by now that what happens in my family and in my head just couldn't be happening anywhere else.

But we live in the cut-and-paste age, and it is easier than ever before to borrow words and ideas.

This little story which I am carefully referencing here is from the Sept. 2010 issue of the Reader's Digest, p. 60, and was submitted for publication by one Bob Wheeler. It is the perfect case in point:

At a planning meeting at my college, I congratulated a colleague on producing some superb student-guidance notes explaining how to combat plagiarism.

“How long did it take you to write that?” I asked.

“Not long,” he said. “I copied them from another university's website.”

It is interesting that either the original author, the colleague who borrowed, or the submitter sees the need to “combat” plagiarism as if it were a campus terrorist group or the H1N1 virus. Perhaps in the gilded halls of academia, it is possible to get all three abominations confused, at least in terms of their severity.

So, what I want to know is what those guidance notes said. Since they were student notes, they were presumably written to help students fight the dreaded plague, not to aid professors and administrators in their battle against it. But just so you know, most students don't really care. it's the latter's war.

Maybe rule number one said, “Never read your textbook or any other author. You will only be tempted to learn, understand and possibly at some point, repeat what you learned.

And perhaps rule number two: remember that even if your term paper is graded on clarity, you will have to resort to your own phrases and labels, however ambiguous or second-rate they may be. In fact, once you hear a perfectly turned phrase, you will never be satisfied with another, but the tendency to repeat it must be aggressively withstood. No wonder America's students are lagging behind.

I know, you are thinking that America's students should be having their own ideas, and be concisely stating them in their own words. Well, there are only so many of those to go around and most of them are already taken. Not only that, they are sure to be circulated out there somewhere in cut-and-paste land.

My solution to the problem is for more students to skip the liberal arts and focus on math and sciences. In those disciplines, the learner is encouraged to use the exact same methods for solving problems as the teacher or textbook author presents.

In fact copying is the standard mode of demonstrating what you have learned, and no ambiguity is tolerated, nor is original thinking. You don't have to be trying to think up new ways to solve math problems or trying to produce a different answer than the textbook has. Takes off all the pressure.

Okay, all of you English and literature teachers, relax. I am just trying to express an original idea or two about plagiarism, and I don't expect to inspire any cut-and-paste rebellions.