7. Myth of Effectiveness of the Plagiarism Handout

All educational institutions publish a plagiarism policy for students, and there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of handbooks, handouts, and websites that provide students information on documenting sources. Yet the problem persists. Certainly there are those students who intentionally plagiarize, but often students, especially students from other cultures, do not know they are plagiarizing, or cannot understand the concept of plagiarism.

Leki observes that students from other countries are raised in cultures with very different views of how knowledge is communicated. She explains, "In some places in the world, students are encouraged to learn/memorize the writings of the learned of antiquity and to use those, not their own thoughts, in their writing. For these students, originality in the sense that we use the term may seem immodest and presumptuous" (71). Student can also use others' words to honor them, "It is possible that these students copy the words and phrases of other writers because the limitations of their range in English cause them to feel that there is no other way to say the same thing. But it is equally true that sometimes students use other authors' texts because they admire the way they are written and feel that changing them would imply that they are trying to improve upon them" (Leki 71).

Students from communal cultures find puzzling the western concept of owning words: "these attitudes toward originality and toward writing as property do not prevail worldwide"(Leki 71). Students from cultures where oral language dominates, and where
there are hardly any written texts in their languages, find the idea of documentation especially confounding.

In other words, how do we account for students who read the handbooks, handouts, and websites, but still produce writing full of documentation errors, or there is not any documentation? I have had many experiences explaining the idea of documentation to international students, and sometimes they have looked at me with either blank stares, or looks of disbelief, and then proceeded to do as they have always done-leave out citations. But I have been successful when I have provided a model and explained the reasoning behind the convention of documentation. Citation is a complex skill, and varies from discipline to discipline, and even within disciplines there are differences. Handbooks, handouts, and websites must be mediated to be effective.