"For Sale by 'Author': Online Essay Mills and Authorship in the Academy"

About the Author

Danielle Roach is currently pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric and New Media at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia where she is also serving as the Assistant Director of Composition Studies. She has taught writing for about seven years and is especially interested in multimodal composition and play in the writing classroom. Her research interests include digital communities, authorship, rhetorics of play, computers and composition, writing program administration, and digital humanities.

Contents

Introduction

Writing: The "Right Way" versus the "Wrong Way"

Academic Perspectives on Plagarism

OEMs & Academic Authorship

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

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 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 gaining 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 allows us a more complete notion of how online paper mills, students, and writing classrooms within the academy interact to inform, complicate, and define the role of the author.

This paper will examine some of the scholarly and theoretical discussions about plagiarism and writing before moving to an interrogation of the language and practices of OEMs. By examining these sites, this paper seeks to explore both the possibilities and limitations inherent in a discourse that frames academic “rules” about writing and authorship as standards to be simultaneously subverted and reified.