Problems in the Descriptive Mode

Laura Thain — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:26:13 +0000

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Laura Thain

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Although teaching a descriptive unit is an essential foundation for good writing, many instructors find summary tedious to teach, and especially difficult to present to students in interesting, innovative ways. In my class, we learn how to adopt the descriptive mode as historiography, giving students a chance to both practice good summary and question the processes by which summary is produced and presented in a common rhetorical context. Nonetheless, students are usually anxious to move on to analysis as we wrap up the first unit.

Aside from just tending toward dreariness, unfortunately, at least in my experience, descriptive units also tend to have the highest instance of plagiarism, despite the fact that the skill instructors expect students to demonstrate—clear, cogent summary—is arguably the easiest rhetorical mode to grasp in lower-level rhetoric and writing classes. Certainly, most students will understand summary quickly, and many also tend to rely heavily on summary when analyzing or evaluating the merits of an argument. Why is it, then, that incidents of plagiarism are highest when the performative bar is lowest? Is there a correlation between the assignment difficulty and academic dishonesty? In other words, how much credence can we give to arguments that plagiarism is an act of desperation or the result of an overworked, overtaxed cohort of undergraduates?

I think we might find better answers by addressing lack of interest and lack of engagment. Bad information tracking often leads to students passing off something they’ve read as common knowledge, which is less of an attribute of a digital generation of students than it is of a digital generation of enforcers. Common knowledge has always been a tricky concept to define: The University of Texas’ academic dishonesty policy clearly states that “common knowledge” (things, of course, that require no citation) is a flexible category, and that what constitutes common knowledge

often depend[s] on the context, such as the academic discipline of a particular course or the writer's field of study orprofession. For example, what is considered common knowledge for an academic journal may not hold true for an undergraduate composition course.

But instructors with digital searching tools can now easily identify the source of uncited information through a simple Google search. Siphoning out “common” from “uncommon” knowledge before the Boolean search was nearly impossible, and so more often, marginal comments would read “source?” rather than “plagiarized.”

And what is “common knowledge” to students writing outside of their home discipline? Introductory rhetoric courses contain students that have benefitted least from common core curricula or standards of academic performance because they have experienced neither broad university-level writing training nor share specific disciplinary training. Classroom diversity in terms of socioeconomic, educational, and language background is a given in most classrooms (at least, in universities that cultivate a diverse student body), but diversity of disciplinary training is an attribute mostly of lower-level or general-curriculum courses. The instructor is faced with a dilemma when making choices about teaching foundational skills to classrooms with extremely mixed needs. The instructor often finds him or herself ethically obligated to teach to the lowest level of student skill, with the unfortunate potential side effect of losing the interest of other student contingents.

While summarizing might be a basic skill, avoiding plagiarism is certainly more nuanced. As Rebecca Moore Howard argues, the line between paraphrase and plagiarism is subjective. (Howard’s own syllabi argues that “patchwriting,” or “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes” does not constitute plagiarism, but merely “poor writing.”) Common knowledge is also a subjective, context-dependent category. In other common plagiarism situations, such as the presentation of direct quotations as paraphrase with the appropriate in-page citation, the intent of the student is often unclear.

Many pedagogical resources on the internet suggest ways to present this nuance--acknowledging the nuances of plagiarism and engaging in meta-teaching, emphasizing building scholarly ethos, spending more classroom time on concrete examples of plagiarism, discussing the changing face of intellectual property in the digital age to clear up confusion about authorship, etc. But not many professors or instructors address the issues I’ve just highlighted above: that loss of interest while teaching critical skills can prevent some students who can easily understand the nuances of plagiarism from paying any attention to them. The assumption of knowledge can foreclose the possibility of understanding in this case.

I’d like to then posit that the most effective strategy for avoiding plagiarism is not an instructor’s presentation of knowledge but his or her insistence on engagement with that knowledge. Testing students on subtler forms of plagiarism for a nominal grade encourages engagement with the material that even the most eloquent academic honesty policy does not. This will do nothing to deter malicious plagiarism—buying papers, colluding on papers, or copy-and-pasting papers—but these instances of plagiarism are far less common. A simple, tested response to common issues of plagiarism, even one given at the beginning of each new unit, might do wonders in decreasing plagiarism incidents without forcing the instructor to assume a policing stance.

Inventing with Images

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:20:26 +0000

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Megan Gianfagna

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Will Bailey

I’ve often had students work with images in past semesters, but in those activities I’ve used them as texts for analysis or tools for organization, as when students constructed visual-verbal-aural outlines in Animoto to help them prepare for their formal essays. This semester I decided to have my RHE 306 class focus on using images to aid in invention and construction of a succinct argument. Specifically, I asked them to create a bumper sticker through an in-class activity meant to help them explore commonplaces and introduce them to visual rhetoric. As I note in my lesson plan, students created their bumper stickers, along with a short reflection, in one class period.

Because the activity acted as a bridge into our rhetorical analysis unit, I wanted it to call their attention to basic design decisions like placement, size, color and typeface as well as the rhetorical impact of these elements. Most importantly, I wanted them to focus on how they were responding to or incorporating a particular commonplace in their bumper sticker and crafting a message to accompany the image. To accomplish these goals, I suggested they use PowerPoint or even Word unless they had past experience with more sophisticated image-manipulation software. I found they were familiar with importing images into PowerPoint from making presentations in the past, and that when they had questions about what to do or how to do it, they were able to collaborate with those around them to arrive at a solution.

Using familiar technology in a low-stakes assignment made them feel more comfortable as they were building confidence in their capacity for visual and verbal invention and composition. Though they were uncomfortable at first with what they perceived as a more creative exercise than they’d encountered in most other writing courses, they were able to write copy that employed a variety of very effective rhetorical strategies and convey their ideas in a genre-appropriate way. I was particularly impressed at how they were able to use each other as resources for brainstorming and thinking through how their bumper stickers might be read differently if actually applied to a car.

I believe the added value of this assignment was in how students used familiar software in an unfamiliar way. It pushed them to think about the program’s capabilities and not just the particular rhetorical situations and genres it has become closely associated with. As Stuart Selber says in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, one marker of students’ functional literacy is “mak[ing] use of the specialized discourses associated with computers” (45), a goal that instructors can help them reach by encouraging them to “appropriate the various discourses of literary technologies” (58). As much as I enjoy showing students the possibilities offered by newer, shinier programs, I found that helping them see alternative uses and greater composing potential in a familiar platform was simple and rewarding.

Blogging Pedagogy - commonplaces

Problems in the Descriptive Mode

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Inventing with Images

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