A Statement on Plagiarism Using someone else’s ideas or phrasing and representing those ideas or phrasing as our own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is a serious offense known as plagiarism. “Ideas or phrasing” includes written or spoken material, of course — from whole papers and paragraphs to sentences, and, indeed, phrases — but it also includes statistics, lab results, art work, etc. “Someone else” can mean a professional source, such as a published writer or critic in a book, magazine, encyclopedia, or journal; an electronic resource such as material we discover on the World Wide Web; another student at our school or anywhere else; a term paper writing service (online or otherwise) which offers to sell written papers for a fee. Let us suppose, for example, that we’re doing a paper for Music Appreciation on the child prodigy years of the composer and pianist Franz Liszt and that we’ve read about the development of the young artist in several sources. In Alan Walker’s book Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years (Ithaca: 1983), we read that Liszt’s father encouraged him, at age six, to play the piano from memory, to sight-read music and, above all, to improvise. We can report in our paper (and in our own words) that Liszt was probably the most gifted of the child prodigies making their mark in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century — because that is the kind of information we could have gotten from a number of sources; it has become what we call common knowledge. However, if we report on the boy’s father’s role in the prodigy’s development, we should give proper credit to Alan Walker. We could write, for instance, the following: Franz Liszt’s father encouraged him, as early as age six, to practice skills which later served him as an internationally recognized prodigy (Walker 59). Or, we could write something like this: Alan Walker notes that, under the tutelage of his father, Franz Liszt began work in earnest on his piano playing at the age of six (59). Not to give Walker credit for this important information is plagiarism.

Know thy audience and watch thy jargon Know your audience! At typical REU/SURF presentations, the audience consists of a wide variety of people from different disciplines. Roughly, the structure of your talk should reflect the following goals for previous paper writing: (a) hook everyone (including those not in your area) on your topic/problem; (b) impress the experts with your specific work; (c) wrap up and recapture the attention of the non-experts. The fraction of your talk devoted to each of these depends on the level of sophistication of your audience. Framing the problem can be a challenge. Are there popular-press or “real-world” examples you can appeal to in order to illustrate what you’re doing? Even examples from Star Trek can be useful, since a lot of technology areas are rapidly approaching the abilities envisioned in that venerable show. Graphics, photos, and short video clips are also useful. Your project advisor can probably help you find something appropriate. Beware of jargon, which covers both terms and concepts. Some people don’t know what public-key cryptography is; others are specialists and just want to know which cryptosystem you used. Some people aren’t familiar with the concept of separating a user interface from a device or application; plan to explain it if needed. Keep the big picture in mind What is the high level view of what’s going on? You need to motivate the overall project to an audience who might be thoroughly unfamiliar with it. In a SURF talk, it might take up to 1/3 of the talk to motivate the problem and be sure everyone understands (at least at a high level) why it’s useful, interesting, etc. This is time well spent: if people don’t understand the ultimate goal, they probably won’t pay attention to what you did. How is the big picture divided into subproblems, and where do you fit in? Now that the big picture is clear, what are the specific subproblem challenges? Which part of which subproblem are you working on? Some of this will necessarily get into details that not everyone in the audience can follow.

Authorship as a critical construct has been parsed and debated in scholarly circles for centuries, and yet within the walls of writing classrooms, both students and instructors have for a long time tacitly accepted that there is a right and a wrong way to be an author. In Western cultures, and in the United States in particular, the model for the “right way” indicates adherence to grammatical and structural standards, understanding of genre and modes, and assimilation into some overarching academic discourse. At the same time, however, the “wrong way” includes an individual’s copying the words of others, re-creating passages from published authors, and incorporating other too-close-to-the-original content. Complicating these contradictions is the intersection of the writing classroom with digital culture and the internet in particular. Painfully evident at this intersection is the inherent disconnect between how authority is conceived in the composition classroom and how it is conferred in other social spaces. One more recent phenomenon associated with digital culture has been the online essay mill (OEM). Hundreds of sites purport to offer students with custom essay writing service a chance to share, sell, and buy essays. Within the confines of the commercial web, these sites work to challenge dominant ideas about authorship while simultaneously reinforcing those standards as legitimate by promising students opportunity to cheat that system. Thus, an examination of the rhetoric of the sites themselves can help further enrich our understanding of the function and voice of OEMs. In any discussion of plagiarism and authorship in digital spaces, resting on the voices of academics would be at best naïve and at worst wholly inadequate for garnering any true sense of the circulation of power and ideas that inform and construct this complex issue. Looking at the language used by the sites themselves help inform a more complete notion of how online paper mills, students, and writing classroom within the academy interact to inform, complicate, and define the role of the author.