September 2007 — eLearning
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A War of Words
BYTESIZE
The Conference on College Composition and Communications' position paper on plagiarism can be found here.
"Paraphrasing is more accurate because [the students] can see original material as they paraphrase it," Mohan explains, "and they have a much easier time organizing material from their note cards and can reorder them quickly, then begin their papers. They begin to feel good as they see these note cards accumulating in an organized way.
"Students have the original source in front of them, and they can see what a paraphrase looks like on their note card right below the source material." Mohan explains that the antidote to plagiarism is teaching: "I have not used plagiarism detection tools, other than just running a Google search of a grouping of words, but that is all after the fact and does nothing to teach the students how not to plagiarize in the first place. I do believe some plagiarism is deliberate, but some occurs because we just do not really teach what it means to paraphrase or what is quote-worthy material. [What I use] is a teaching tool, not a detection tool, and that is a significant difference."
-Jim Paterson is a freelance writer based in Maryland.
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