Ashleigh, your classroom practice of introducing the terms as “up for discussion” is very encouraging!

John, and all, I suppose, for me, authorship means positioning my own ideas against others and constructing a piece of writing that is not necessarily “original” but that provides a new voice for the topic. For instance, in my paper research, I’m constantly thinking “Oh, Diana George already argued this” or “Wait, Greg Wilson disagrees with me!” But, I need to remind myself that just because my ideas aren’t the romantic ideal of being original and individual, it doesn’t mean that the process isn’t useful to me and my final audience (whether that be “important PWE people” or a small collection of fellow grad students). Discussing ideas is, and always will be, important, and, even if the audience isn’t large or “important,” the role of the author still is, because author’s write and writers form ideas, and ideas form the future of the field whether in the workplace or academia. Maybe the question of “author” depends largely on who that author thinks their audience is and what that audience would find useful. But, perhaps I’m steeped in the “academic culture”! I am interested in this idea of authorship as a cultural issue…thinking of MySpace and the Hispanic population…

One way to approach the plagiarism issue is to define it in terms of context. In the classroom, we can talk about the standards and practices of academic writing versus workplace writing. Last semester, my students and I spent a class period discussing plagiarism and authorship. I presented them with a variety of situations that could be considered plagiarism, and we discussed how to recognize plagiarism in academic writing. None of the situations was clear-cut, and the discussion was one of the liveliest of the semester.

At the end of the class period, I asked them to reflect on what it means to be an author, and how they define authorship. Some students wrote about how they had never thought about the relationships between their own writing and the work of others – citing sources was just something they “had to do.” One student commented that “there’s nothing new under the sun” and argued that we place far too much emphasis on being “original.” Others talked about how they don’t feel like they ever “own” the writing they do for school, but that they do see themselves as the authors of, say, Facebook statues. Still others didn’t see statuses or text messages as writing at all.

Overall, I think interrogating the concepts of “author” and “plagiarism” in the writing classroom can be highly beneficial to students. It’s difficult to come up with a consistent definition of either term (and I wouldn’t want my students to walk away thinking that “an author is X, and only X”).