Howard and Plagiarism

In my current syllabus for English 120, I have a section about academic honesty (as required by the university) that was originally included on the sample syllabus given to me when I first started teaching. One of the main parts of the section is labeled “Academic Honesty Defined.” This is an interesting word choice because Rebecca Howard describes plagiarism as something that is not easily defined in his article, “Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism.” In my syllabus, academic honesty is defined as “All written and oral presentations must ‘respect the intellectual rights of others. Statements lifted verbatim from publications must be cited as quotations. Ideas, summaries or paraphrased material, and other information taken from the literature must be properly referenced’ (Guidelines for the Presentation of Disquisitions, NDSU Graduate School, 4).”

However, the academic honesty section continues with a specification by the English department. It states, “Instructors in the English department try to distinguish between inadvertent and deliberate plagiarism. Initial instances of inadvertent plagiarism will be pointed out and revision will be expected; deliberate plagiarism may result in zero for an assignment, possible F for the course.” This perspective on plagiarism is someone similar to Howard’s in that there are many different facets to the broad term. She would like to see the all-encompassing term of plagiarism broken down into more specific terms like “fraud, insufficient citation, and excessive repetition” (Howard 1207). The NDSU English department seems to acknowledge that a writer’s intent should be considered while “College regulations against plagiarism typically exclude the author and his or her intentions from the adjudication of cases” (1206).

In her article, Howard explains why the view of plagiarism needs to change. She draws connections between plagiarism and gender, describing how many scholars “gender” the way they discuss “authorship” (Howard 1207). For example, William Perry categorizes writing using words like “bull” and “cow” (Howard 1207). Howard writes, “Here Perry draws on the familiar attribution of abstraction (the intellect) to masculinity and concreteness (the body) to femininity” (1208). The gendering continues when the word plagiarism is traced back “to include not only the stealing of slaves but also textual appropriation” (Howard 1211). Additionally, plagiarism is viewed as a contamination of a work of writing like disease infects the body, where the body “is the feminine” (Howard 1212).

At the end of the article, Howard leaves us with her solution to the ambiguous nature of “plagiarism.” She believes that plagiarism should be linked with the writer of a piece, not just the piece itself. We seem to have adopted this view in the English department. I’m interested in knowing when this additional policy was added though. Howards article was published in 2000. What was the English department’s view of plagiarism back then?

Again, in regards to the many different ways one could plagiarize, Howard states “that everything be removed from that category” (1218). She seems to agree with us that “fraud” is unacceptable, however the other categorizes seem to be more open for discussion. As far as I’m aware, I have only discovered unintentional plagiarism during some of the first papers I received in English 120. However, after students are given the opportunity to revise, the problem of missing quotes or in-text citations seems to be cleared up.