More troublesome are the academic black-or gray- sheep who by theory or practice facilitate plagiarism. Kenneth Goldsmith of the University of Pennsylvania extols "patchwriting," a way of "weaving together various shards of other people's words into a tonally cohesive whole. It's a trick students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words. "He describes a published essay strung together in this manner as "a self-reflective, demonstrative work of original genius." This is a trend among young writers, "For them the act of writing is literally moving language from one place to another."
The last requirement is where the system gets confused. No teacher really expects any student essay to revolutionize our understanding of the world, to be so original that the firmament begins to wobble. The opportunity to be truly original has gotten rarer through the eons. As Mark Twain put it, "What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before." No, originality means something more modest: that the student, after much reflection and weighing of the assembled evidence, has written in a way that reflects the particular contours of his or her thinking. The turns and twists of the prose, the things emphasized and the things neglected, the way the essay opens and closes, and how errors, some small and some large, inevitably infiltrate the prose--these features, constituting the essay's fingerprint, are evidence that the student has written something original. But truth to tell, its not working that way. Today, lots of students cheat. They use the work of others. They buy essays. They plagiarize. Still, even though the Web makes cheating easier than ever before, and thus more prevalent, the phenomenon of cheating is nothing new. Students have been at it for a long time.
Copied from Chace, W. M. (2012). A Question of Honor. (Cover story). American Scholar, 81(2), 20-32.
