Category: Academic writing

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Academic writing Plagiarism Term papers

Plagiarism—Using Sources Ethically

Al Capone mugshot, Miami, FloridaI have found that many students are confused and helpless when it comes to understanding why a professor, including myself, has accused them of plagiarism. It seems to be a common practice for student writers to find an online article and then copy and paste a sentence into their paper. They often put a sentence from one article in the same paragraph as another one. Sometimes the original articles are cited, but more often not. When we sit down in my office to talk about it, they tell me this was how they wrote all their papers in high school. Some students from outside the US have told both Harvey and me this is how they were taught to write papers.

But let me make it clear. In the US, at university and professional levels, scholarly writers are expected to generate their own words and not copy any strings of words from sources. If you do lift a sentence or phrase, it must be in quotation marks, with the source properly cited, with page numbers. There is only one reason to use a sentence verbatim from a source: The author of that work says something really important to your argument and there simply is no better way to say it.

If you do use ideas from a source, you must cite the ideas you use, not just direct quotes. Basically you must cite any time the question arises in the reader’s mind: How do you know that?

Merely assembling sentences from online websites and PDFs of articles and books is not writing. It seems like some kind of word salad. The writing you produce comes from your own thoughts and opinions, not a goulash of other people’s ideas.

P.S. Most professors at American colleges and universities have access to software that checks student assignments against what’s on the Internet and elsewhere, so the chances of getting caught for plagiarism are much greater than ever.

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Academic writing Closing statments Opening statements

The Secret of Academic Writing

All academic writing is an argument.Depiction of scribe writing in a multi-quire codex

If someone had told me this explicitly at the beginning of my grad school career, I would have been spared a lot of grief and rejected articles I later submitted to journals. I say explicitly because I think probably a couple of professors intended their assignments to identify the arguments in various articles to drive home this point. But even though I’m pretty smart and was judged to be a good writer, I didn’t get it.

I finally learned to be ruthless in paring down my paragraphs to include only those that served the argument I was trying to make. Sometimes the argument is not clear to me until I’ve written a draft. Writing is, for me, and I think for most good writers, a thinking tool. As I’m writing things fall into place, and I make connections and nail down insights as I write. I don’t know what I think until I write.

But since the next most important function of writing is communication—and notice I put it in second place, because writing has to be about ideas, and it will be a mediocre piece if I’m not putting myself into the work—once I’ve gotten that first thinking tool draft done, much more needs to happen.

If I wasn’t clear about my argument before, or if the argument turns out to be different from what I thought I was starting with, then I have to rewrite the opening. The argument needs to show up in the first, or at the latest, in the second paragraph.

My personal technique is to then write an outline of the draft. I know it is recommended you start with an outline, but that usually doesn’t help me. I make an outline of what is already there, and it quickly becomes evident where the evidence does not back up the claim I made in the opening paragraph. Usually I find a lot of extraneous material— nice paragraphs, nice thinking—but they don’t support the argument. They have to go. If there are two arguments, which often happens, again, for a journal article, one of them has to go.

Something with the unwieldy name of Science Writing Heuristic has helped me immensely with writing conclusions for scholarly essays. You can find it on my education blog here. (If you’re not a science educator it might not make much sense. I used to use the framework with both middle school students and teacher candidates.) What I took from this approach is that my conclusion needs to explicitly state how the evidence supports the argument, in some detail, perhaps a paragraph or two.

Happy writing!

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Academic writing Encylopedias Research tools Term papers

Research Tools: Using Wikipedia or Not?

Philip Roth
Novelist Philip Roth who had a problem with his Wikipedia entry.

When I used to list the dos and don’ts for my students writing term papers, I warned them

not to cite Wikipedia as a source. At the same time, I also said it wasn’t a bad idea to consult Wikipedia

in writing your paper. While this may seem contradictory and perhaps hypocritical, I assure you it is not.

The most basic reason for not citing a Wikipedia article is that your professor will almost automatically disallow it and your grade can suffer. The articles also fail to meet one of the most traditional criteria for evaluating a published source.

As I noted in yesterday’s post, Wikipedia articles might be seen as term papers rather than original scholarly research. In fact, the guidelines for contributors specifically state:

“Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought. This includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas, as well as any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position. This means that Wikipedia is not the place to publish your own opinions, experiences, arguments, or conclusions.”

Given these rules, it is understandable that their entries tend to repeat the standard narrative on any topic.

More important, almost anybody can write or rewrite an article, and the author’s identity is by policy anonymous. So there is no way to tell whether it was written by high school dropout or by a specialist with a PhD. How then, professors will point out, can you evaluate the validity of an article if you are unable to check out the author’s credentials?

But if you’re unfamiliar with a topic, a good Wikipedia article can provide a useful summary of information about it; in addition, its citations, lists of further reading and external links can also give you a quick overview of the literature in the field—which is one the values of a good encyclopedia.

However, Wikipedia articles can at times be wildly inaccurate and misleading, especially in regards to lesser known topics. Scholars who come across one of these erroneous entries may not be inclined to complain or take the time to rewrite it. (Why bother rewriting something only to have some person or persons unknown promptly change it?)

The seeming absurdity of some of Wikipedia’s policies was revealed in 2012, when Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth tried to correct a “misstatement” about the inspiration for his novel, The Human Stain. However, his request was rejected because Roth was not considered a credible source of information about himself. However, they did note the corrections when Roth published an open letter to Wikipedia in The New Yorker, since, under their rules, it was a more credible source! For a more nuanced history of this episode, I recommend two pieces published in The Guardian here and here.

— Harvey Deneroff