"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

Conclusion

The complicated nature of seeking to pin down a definition of authorship can make it difficult to determine just how these OEMs function in a larger system, particularly as either intermediaries or at least influences on students seeking to “make it” in the academy. Certainly, digital culture has changed the way some of these issues present themselves, but arguably many of the issues can be traced back to ideas about power and knowledge that have been debated for years. As scholars continue to debate just what it means to be an author, these sites have the potential to provide fertile grounds for studying that role at the intersection of the public spaces of Internet and the more protected spaces of the academy.

Further study is needed, then, to determine just how (and how much) these OEMs impact the work of student writers. Scholars should also seeks to gather more empirical evidence about the rates of usage of these sites in order to understand just how much they contribute to students’ ideas about academic writing and how much of a “threat” (if any) they may really be. Additionally, more research on the usage of OEMs by students will help broaden the conversation about both the function of the college writing classroom in the larger academy and also of academic writing itself as seen both internally by scholars who have a stake in its definition and externally by society at large.

OEMs and their relationship to the dominant authorship model set forth by the academy also promise to offer vast potential for discussion when examined through the lens of gaming theory. Certainly an inspection of how these sites are used to “play” the system would offer scholars improved ways to talk about the functions and effects of these sites in and on the kind of writing that is expected in colleges and universities. As users engage with sites like eCheat.com, the ways in which students “play” with these sites may be better understood when examined through the rhetoric of gaming.

Finally, closer examination of OEMs will likely unveil much richer and more varied debate in composition studies about not just what scholars value as academic discourse, but why those particular features are considered to be of value and whether those values hold in a 21st-century digital writing environment. Ultimately, then, this essay should serve as a call not only for more concentrated study of both the presence and the effects of OEMs, but also for reconsideration of the institutional influences, both academic and not, that circulate and redirect social ideas about authorship.