Instructors can have certain expectations about students’ prior knowledge of communication methods-- expectations that may not always match reality. “Research” is one form of academic work that can be wildly different from discipline to discipline and culture to culture. Working with sources, however, is common across many, if not most, disciplines. Teaching students norms when it comes to citing sources is integral to a student’s ability to maintain academic integrity. You can support academic integrity with the following three strategies:
- Emphasize Ethics, Not Rules
- Make Plagiarism-Proof Assignments
- Distinguish Between Summary, Paraphrase, & Direct Quotation
1. Emphasize Ethics, Not Rules
We recommend our colleague UW English professor John Webster's eloquent web page about plagiarism. Here, we call attention to his central recommendation that
The first thing you can do to prevent plagiarism is to help students understand what plagiarism is: using words or ideas of others without citing sources appropriately. But we need to go further if we are to impress upon students how important this concept is to us. For the source-based nature of academic writing is one of the major differences between academic and other kinds of writing. For us, the question is not whether we will use the work of others, but how.
In any college course that assigns writing it is a virtual certainty that students will be engaging with source material in some fashion or other. To do so is to enter a scholarly conversation that is an essential step on the path to thinking like a scholar. Engaging source material appropriately, therefore, should not be treated as an afterthought (often relegated to a copy-pasted blurb on a syllabus, though syllabus language is important too).
We encourage you to have a discussion about academic integrity at some point in your course, perhaps when you are introducing the first assignment. This does not need to be a long discussion by any means, but should define plagiarism specifically in terms of the writing they will do in your course, and might also explain that plagiarism has disciplinary, cultural, and ethical dimensions. It is not just a list of arbitrary, universal rules.
If you are required to or are thinking of using a plagiarism detection software in your course, a section of the final guide on For Faculty Working with TAs discusses the pros and cons of using plagiarism detection software as a means to uphold academic integrity.
2. Make Plagiarism-Proof Assignments
Writing is a great teaching tool because it prompts students to think critically and creatively about source material. That said, some assignments are better than others at pushing students to develop original ideas. Indeed, some assignments are so unoriginal that students can easily find whole essays online to answer the prompt (think: "Analyze three rhetorical devices from Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech.").
One of the best ways, therefore, to helping students avoid plagiarism is to ask unique questions, the answers to which are not readily available. Here are some suggestions for developing assignments that encourage students to do their own thinking and writing:
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Design an assignment that is explicitly grounded in the learning goals of the course. We discussed this in the guide on Designing Successful Assignments, but it bears repeating. A meaningful assignment that has clear stakes for learning creates student investment.
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Ask students to respond to a source, or some combination of sources, in a way that is not likely to have been assigned anywhere else. For example, ask them to do a comparative analysis of two texts that they might choose from a list that you have curated.
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Ask students to compose in a mode other than a traditional academic essay. Here is an assignment that asks students to analyze the different types of publications on one scientific topic, using Adobe Creative Cloud Express, a platform for creating web stories.*
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Scaffold all writing assignments. Instead of asking for a final essay due some point in the future, create stepping stones. For example: first, read and discuss the source material as a class, or in discussion sections. Next read and discuss sample arguments or theses (you can use former student writing, or published examples). Then, ask students to develop and workshop potential arguments (provide your feedback too!). And so on. If the major steps of their writing process are guided, then students will be much less likely to feel overwhelmed and turn to illicit alternatives.
Remember, too, that you do not need to do all of the above on your own. We are well aware of the constraints on faculty time! If you have TAs, asking them to help develop assignments and contribute to grading is not only helpful for you, but is a great professionalizing experience for them (see more in the guide For Faculty Working With TAs). Also, avail yourself of services offered by the likes of the Center for Teaching and Learning, or the Odegaard Writing and Research Center. These centers can help you develop meaningful assignments that encourage honest, thoughtful work.
*Notice, too, that this assignment prompt fulfills several of the suggestions we made in the guide on Designing Successful Assignments: it explains the purpose and stakes of the assignment, tying it in to larger course goals; it offers explicit instructions about what students need to do to fulfill the assignment; and it includes a timeline of all the deadlines students need to meet to complete the assignment.
3. Distinguish Between Summary, Paraphrase, & Direct Quotation
Distinguishing among paraphrasing, summarizing, and using direct quotations is not an easy task; some students may not be aware of the differences, while others may have a sense of them but do not yet grasp how these techniques are used according to your (or your discipline's) expectations. That is why it it so important to not only define the differences but to also explain -- better yet, provide examples of -- how source material is typically engaged in your field.
For example, in many humanities disciplines direct quotation is acceptable and even encouraged because writing style and tone are common objects of analysis -- summarizing Maya Angelou kind of defeats the point! On the other hand, in scientific research articles where economy of language is prized, summarizing is a more concise way to cite sources.
What follows are some basic definitions of each term. We encourage you to:
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Talk through these definitions with your students before their first writing assignment
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Explain which methods of integrating source material are most common for the kinds of writing you assign
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Offer examples of how these are integrated successfully when writing in your discipline
Summary:
A summary is a brief overview of the main points of a particular text, such as a novel or research study. Summaries are typically significantly shorter than the original text.
Paraphrase:
A paraphrase restates a smaller chunk of text (usually a sentence or short passage) in the author’s own words, often for the purpose of clarifying the original author’s intended meaning. Paraphrases are not necessarily shorter than the original text.
Direct quotation:
A direct quotation is a copied excerpt of a text word for word. Direct quotation should always be used with quotation marks, unless there is another standard practice for formatting that is appropriate to the genre in use (such as italics or block quotes).
Even experienced student writers can benefit from a quick review of what citations look like in your discipline. For example, do you require APA, MLA, Chicago-style, or something else? When quoting, what should students put after the quotation marks: footnotes? Parentheses that include the publication date? How are authors' names displayed, if at all: last name, first initial? Only the last name?
Showing examples from relevant texts in your field (e.g., research articles) will give students models that they can emulate, and help them understand how and why citations are used in your field. In our experience, being as explicit as possible about these practices-- not just the how, but also the why-- will help students use them skillfully in your writing assignments.
Also, there are many excellent online resources for formatting in-text citations and references. Perdue University's Online Writing Lab (often just called "OWL") is a great reference for both MLA and APA style guides that we often share in our classes. We emphasize that being able to use a reference guide is a more important skill than memorizing conventions. While it is perfectly reasonable to coach students in citing source material accurately, we also believe that it is not worth seriously penalizing well-intentioned mistakes.
Next Guide: On Grading Writing