"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

Writing: The “Right Way” versus the “Wrong Way”

Writing instructors, and indeed the academy at large, have often taught that there is inherently a “right way” to write in the discourse of the academy and a “wrong way.” Examples of the narrative surrounding the “right way” can be found in just about any textbook designed for a writing course, but are most prominently highlighted in the titles of such books. Diana Hacker, for example, has published dozens of variations of her Writer’s Reference handbook over the years. In fact, the publisher’s web site reports the main Writer’s Reference text as “the most widely adopted handbook in the United States” (Bedford-St. Martin’s). Even since her death in 2004, Hacker’s publications continue to lead the field, having been reworked and retitled with names like Rules for Writers and the forthcoming e-book Writer’s Help (Bedford-St. Martin’s). Though certainly widely respected and used in writing classrooms, the titles suggest to students that writing is a specific “thing,” and that there is, consequently, a codifiable sets of “rules” that will “help” them. Writing the right way is not knowable without the necessary intercession of these books to tell students how to “do writing.”

Books with titles like John Charles Goshert's Entering the Academic Conversation take that narrative a step further. This title and others like it suggest to the student that the conversation that is going on within the academy is something to which you must gain admittance, suggesting even perhaps that there is some secret to entering the discourse. Even the forthcoming second edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing seems to frame itself in terms of conversion of students to the “right way” of writing, as its press release reveals: "Beginning from the premise that academic writing is a conversation -- a collegial exchange of ideas, undertaken in a spirit of collaboration to pursue new knowledge -- From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Practical Guide demystifies cross-curricular thinking and writing by breaking it down into a series of comprehensible habits and skills that students can learn in order to join the conversation" (Bedford-St. Martin’s).

Of course the "right way" includes a set of standards, as most handbooks contain sections on punctuation, spelling, mechanics, sentence structure, and the like, but alongside those “rules” for form are often an equally rigid set of prescriptions for things like style, citation, research, and argument.

The “wrong way” to write, then, is constructed not only through chastisement of non-standard mechanical and grammatical practices, non-linear organization, and informal diction, but also through the condemnation of transgressions of content, none of which are so despised as the generations-old scourge of writing itself: plagiarism. Composition handbooks like The Little, Brown Handbook (a consistent bestseller among writing handbooks, now in its 11th edition) frame the issue of plagiarism as being of two distinct varieties. This handbook addresses the issue outright in a section entitled “Avoiding Plagiarism and Documenting Sources” wherein there is a differentiation between what the handbook calls “deliberate” and “accidental” plagiarism. Throughout these textbooks, however, there is a sense that the authors seem to be assuming that any plagiarism by students reading their texts would be of the accidental variety, and so much of the discussion has to do with when to cite and when not to, the difference between paraphrase, summary, and quotation, and notes about the various citation systems (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). Fascinatingly scarce is the discussion of forms of deliberate plagiarism; The Little, Brown Handbook sets forth only a brief list of examples:

Copying or downloading a phrase, a sentence, or a longer passage from a source and passing it off as your own by omitting quotation marks and a source citation.

Summarizing or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas without acknowledging your debt in a source citation.

Handing in as your own work a paper you have bought, copied off the Web, had a friend write, or accepted from another student. (424)

Interestingly, the only other mention of these “deliberate” forms of plagiarism comes in a brief section called “Committing and detecting plagiarism on the Internet.” Far from seeking to engage students in any thoughtful consideration of the role that the Internet may play in how they understand authorship, the section reads as a stern and foreboding warning. In just a few sentences, they frame stealing and purchasing papers as the work of “the dishonest student” and the authors of the textbook firmly insist in bold-face type that “paying for research or a paper does not make it the buyer’s work” (425). The brief section also cautions that the villainous Internet that allows students access to steal or purchase someone else’s words can in fact be a fickle ally: “The Internet has made it easier to plagiarize than ever before, but it has also made plagiarism easier to catch” (425). Again, however, The Little, Brown Handbook seems to dismiss the practice as a form of extreme deviance, and it wastes little time considering (or asking students to consider) just how OEMs function and why they work the way they do. Thus, the conversations in textbooks seem to imply a standard of good writing practice that summarily excludes the undocumented voices of anyone but the student writer. These perspectives will become crucial when we examine how the OEMs frame their own ideas about writing and authorship.