Lessons from the plagiarism police: Keeping writers out of trouble
By Aileen Brenner Houston and Rebecca Pieken
When it comes to plagiarism, crime and punishment is a misplaced focus. This might sound surprising coming from a duo who dubs themselves the plagiarism police, but during our ACES 2019 session in Providence, we revealed our role as double agents: We’re not the plagiarism police but rather the attribution fairy godmothers, grinding citations into fairy dust and sprinkling their sparkles far and wide across the publishing kingdom.
As editors, our goal is to avoid plagiarism before publication. We shouldn’t be the ones slamming the cell shut; we should be keeping our writers out of the cell in the first place.
Easier than spotting plagiarism and (tactfully) confronting a writer, however, is arming writers against it in the first place. Most plagiarism we deal with these days is inadvertent. How can writers follow the rules when the rules vary from field to field and publication to publication, or when they’re rarely a topic of discussion?
The best plagiarism-prevention tool in our arsenal is attribution. When source material is attributed properly, plagiarism—at least the inadvertent kind—is rarely an issue. Talk to others at your organization about the norms for attribution in your field and in house. Define plagiarism and discuss the gray areas: When is it OK to borrow information from another source without citing it? When is it OK to borrow language without quoting it? In all fields, there are times when both are acceptable, such as with instances of common knowledge and common language.
But the line between right and wrong is sometimes blurrier than we want it to be.
At the Naval Postgraduate School, we preach attribution like it’s going out of style (though we’re confident it’s here to stay longer than ibid. or the hyphen in chocolate-chip cookie). On our Citation Guides webpage, we provide a wealth of information to address the gray areas. We encourage you to distribute these guides to your staff or to use them as inspiration to create your own ( just make sure to borrow fairly!).
Here are a few of our guides:
- Citing responsibly explains the types of information that need to be cited. It also explains those that don’t—such as common knowledge—and how to differentiate between borrowed and paraphrased language in your writing (hint: it’s quotation marks). On the Citation Guides landing page, iterations of this handout include a second page with citation-style-specific guidelines.
- Paraphrasing and quoting includes tips to help writers decide if a direct quote is more appropriate than a paraphrase. It also shows the difference between a fair paraphrase and an insufficient paraphrase (also known as patchwriting, and often considered plagiarism).
- Using signal phrases effectively explores how signal phrases (e.g., “According to so-and-so” “The website notes”) can supplement citations and offer clarity, and how writers can use sentence flow to unobtrusively craft attribution into their text.
- Common comments from plagiarism-detection software reports reviews the issues that plagiarism reports typically identify. It also explains how a writer can avoid them and provides some tips; for instance, how to format quotes within quotes and when to ignore—or not—common language flagged by the software.
In our libguides, we even provide tailored guidance to ensure in-text citations and reference list entries follow the intricate rules of style guides. (Careful reading of the examples is rewarded with comic relief.)
As editors, we keep our writers out of trouble. And the trouble of plagiarism outweighs the trouble of tricky plural possessives and ambiguous pronouns. Know the consequences of plagiarism and the implications. Get your writers comfortable with attribution and make sure they know in-house norms.
All it takes is a little bit of fairy dust.
Aileen Brenner Houston is a thesis processor and the attribution lead for the Naval Postgraduate School (contractor, Sustainment and Restoration Services), where she manages the plagiarism-prevention initiative. The recipient of ACES’ 2018 Aubespin scholarship, Aileen is pursuing a master’s degree in rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies from Northern Arizona University.
Rebecca Pieken is a thesis processor for the Naval Postgraduate School (contractor, Sustainment and Restoration Services), where she works with students and faculty on editing, formatting, and attribution. She is a co-creator of the comprehensive citation guides on the school’s citation style web pages. Rebecca has more than 30 years’ experience in publishing, including time as managing editor at Henry Holt and Macmillan and project manager at McGraw-Hill.
Lessons from the Plagiarism Police: Keeping Writers out of Trouble was originally published in Tracking Changes (Fall 2019 edition). Members receive a PDF of the quarterly Tracking Changes newsletter by email.
Header Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
