This essay started as a slightly salty social media post about academic plagiarism, made in the wake of the video essay ‘Plagiarism and You(tube)’ by Harris ‘hbomberguy’ Michael Brewis. I posted the initial few paragraphs, and then received a response from an undergraduate student who felt foolish for not antecedently knowing what I had said in the post. I reassured them that most of my students didn’t know this and then proceeded to write effusively about the purpose of university essay assignments for a while. I asked them for permission to use their contribution, and their name has been changed at their request. This is an unlinked page, so if you’re reading it you were almost certainly given a link to it. Statistically, you’re a student who was given a link to it by a professor. Enjoy!

I teach a lot of undergraduates these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from Wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a tumblr ship blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

Castelli writes: "Please don't kill me, but as a first year undergraduate student - this video opened my eyes to the fact that my understanding of plagiarism was kind of wrong. I knew it was important to cite clearly where you got your information, and that anything copy-pasted without paraphrasing is bad. Honestly, though, I didn't realizing paraphrasing too much from a single source (like the fyre festival video) constituted plagiarism. I also didn't realize how important it was to use quotations and/or cite sources at the ends of sentences to clearly convey which ideas in a paragraph were paraphrased from someone else vs. which were your own original interpretation. I figured that so long as all the sources for information were clearly cited in the references it didn't matter. Anyway, I feel dumb for not realizing earlier and there are things I wish I could go back and rewrite. But I really like Harry's rule of thumb: “If someone saw a clip of your video out of context, would it be possible for them to tell you're quoting someone and where it's from?" (Plagiarism and You(tube), 48:18). The other thing I missed was that using the structure of someone else’s work is also plagiarism, even if the words/ideas are original or paraphrased. Although it’s stressful realising I’ve plagiarised unintentionally in some of my work, I’m glad this taught me better. I’m sure I’m not the only one"

JLW writes: I hope you don't mind me responding to you, Castelli. I have no intention of killing you! And if I went around killing people for this kind of misunderstanding, I'd have to kill a lot of my students, which I suspect my employer would not like. This is a common problem. I'm glad the video helped, and I too hope you're not the only person it helps.

It sounds like you have a much better grasp on this now, but I want to take this opportunity to expand on the point. I'm home sick from work today and not in a position to do anything but read and write, so I'm going to write a bit about plagiarism in university essays, and what I think is the best way for an undergraduate to avoid it. I've addressed it to you, because you're the one who replied, but this is really for any undergraduate who happens to be reading it.

The common pitfall that people fall into when thinking of plagiarism is thinking of it as the violation of some discrete set of rules. Thou shalt cite thy sources. Thou shalt not copy and paste. Thou shalt format thy citations according to the divine command of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). Rules like that. Trouble is, that approach can only ever be so useful. There's a lot of contextual variation when it comes to the question of how much paraphrasing is appropriate - for instance, an assignment that's just asking you to summarize a particular text will have a lot of paraphrasing from one source in it, and that's not a problem. What will serve you better than specific rules is a more general heuristic.

Let's zoom out a bit and ask a larger question: what's the point of a college humanities essay? Why do we professors make students do them? It's certainly not for our benefit - they're difficult and time-consuming to grade - and we certainly know that students don't like them. It's not because we want to be informed of facts, or even because we want to make sure you have command of facts. In-class testing is a way more effective way to establish whether or not you have command of relevant facts, and it's also a much easier method to grade. So, an essay is doing something different.

The point of a college essay is to give you an opportunity to practice joining a scholarly discussion. We don't just want to see that you've read parts of the existing discussion, we want you to try to add your own voice to it. That's why professors will often ask for a minimum number of different sources in an essay - if you have to synthesize many voices and build them into a coherent body of text, you'll probably end up offering some authorial insight of your own along the way (in a way, this is what James Somerton could have been doing, had he been less lazy. There is a real skill in synthesizing and comparing disparate sources!). Your job in an essay is not merely to use sources, but to judge them. If you find two sources that conflict, you get to explain which you think is in the right (if either). If you think two seemingly different perspectives can be put into productive dialogue with each other, you get to say so. And if you think that everyone you've read is wrong, actually, you absolutely get to say so. That's how academics treat each other, and that's the point of an essay. We want you to try to be a historian or a philosopher or a literary critic for a few days (yes, a few. I know you think you can do it in one. Everyone thinks that and everyone's wrong).

Often when I tell students this they respond with a kind of deference - after all, they're not experts, but the people they're reading presumably are. Who are they to judge? And that's true! Students are definitionally not experts. We're not expecting you to be. If you miss something that anyone who's gone through grad school would know about, that's fine. We know that's going to happen. It takes years in grad school to achieve mastery of the canon. It's okay to not already have expertise when we're trying to help you achieve it! Deference to expertise makes sense in other contexts, like when you're writing for the public, but it's not what is being asked of you in a university essay. Gaining expertise requires you to practice thinking like an expert - not just learning, but judging. Reading broadly in the relevant subject is vital, of course, but it's only half the battle. The other half comes from you. The university essay is a safe space to try to figure out what the part that comes from you sounds like.

This may be a surprise to hear, but I actually still remember quite a lot of specific student papers years after I graded them. And that's because I remember what specific students brought to their papers. I got to see them learning that they could intervene in a discussion - that they could bring their own judgement to the table. That their voice could matter. This is one of the great privileges of teaching.

It may feel like we've come a long way from plagiarism, but we haven't. Because this is why plagiarism in education actually matters. In assigning you an essay, I am handing you a microphone and asking what you want to say. I'm not interested in hearing what someone else has said. If you only give me a bunch of stuff paraphrased from elsewhere, there's a real sense in which you just haven't done the assignment, because you haven't said anything. That's the same problem that the youtube plagiarists have - in their rush to talk as much as possible, they say nothing. What does Illuminaughti actually think about Wakefield? What insight does a self-proclaimed Internet Historian have about the tragic tale of Floyd Collins? Somerton mashes up a tonne of different people's writing, but the different people think different things - who does he think is right? We don't know. They said nothing, and then deceived us into watching them say nothing. What a waste of time.

That's the heuristic. That's the thing that will help you avoid plagiarism in the future. Be proud of what you have to say, and don't miss the opportunity to say it! Indicate clearly where you're drawing on other people, not just for their benefit, but for yours - so that it's absolutely clear that your words are your own. You have thoughts worth hearing about, and this is one of the few times in life where you can be sure that at least one person is going to hear about them. And if you can look at your essay and know that it says what you wanted to say, then you don't need to worry about plagiarism anymore. You'll know it's yours.

If you've read this far, Castelli, thank you for indulging me in my little speech. I hope the end of the semester treats you well, and good luck with your future studies.