I Hate Plagiarizing

When students take college level English or English 101, they learn attribution. This school teaches both MLA and APA. However, as a community college, with open enrollment, the school offers three introductory or remedial courses: ENG 095, 096 and 100.

I had a conversation with the chairman of the English department earlier this semester and she talked about how "we" have to make up for 12 years in which writing wasn't taught. It is sometimes true that we "making up" for what was not taught. Some of the students do come here without having written a research paper. The reasons vary. Some were in SPED classes through out school and some were from school districts that did not offer demanding curricula. Others are students who just did not "get" the material. During my first semester here, when I taught ENG 095, I saw some students mature dramatically. Maturity is quite often their problem.

The numbers of students in remedial courses is shocking. I started researching remedial education when I 'tripped' upon a figure of 28% of all entering freshmen take at least one remedial course. I should have bookmarked that figure but I didn't.

This particular student submitted most of an article he found on the internet. The student who plagiarized last semester did the same thing, but took it one step further. As I ask for some form of prewriting, either an outline or brainstorming or both, the previous student submitted a partial paper on which she had hand written the word "prewriting" and then the full paper. Her submission was from the blog of a retired social worker living in Wales. When I confronted her, she said she had saved the blog on her flash drive and accidentally submitted the wrong material. Really? When you had at least read enough of your submission to write on the paper before handing it in?

I know exactly what you mean about plagiarizing junk. My first plagiarizer handed in material that was vague and poorly written. I was surprised that a woman with two college degrees from English universities was such a terrible writer. In the sciences, you have to get a lot of unfounded assumption and bad research.

I think English is a very difficult language to learn and that if students are going to take courses where writing is required (as opposed to math), then they should be encouraged to take several writing classes or in-depth, intermediate ESL classes prior to taking those courses. You want to do what's fair to the students and give them a better foundation. I think their English skills should be assessed prior to admittance so they know where they stand re what level is expected at colleges.

English is mangled by many native English speakers so how can we expect non English speakers to master it in such a short period of time and without the benefit of immersion? Nearly impossible for most, I'd suspect.

The plagiarism issue is a different issue. I would hope all students are informed at the beginning of class what the consequences are should they do that (Failure, expulsion, etc). I shouldn't think this is necessary, since it is cheating and theft, but in case of cultural differences, it's best to be on the safe side and announce the school policies. Have them sign a sheet saying they've been made aware of it.

Hi POM, in Ontario grade 13 has been replaced by something called OAP (Ontario Advanced Placement).

People can apply for university after grade 12, but most good students go for the extra year to fine-tune their grades so that they can get into an honours program at university.

Last time I caught a plagiarist, I put an A on the front page then on the next page I wrote.

Thanks for the info, Beth. I remember way back in grade school that parents and students alike thought there were some great things going on over on the eastern shore of the Detroit River. I knew a couple of students at Wayne State in Detroit who opted to go to school in America so as not to go through Grade 13.

That's funny, Gosh.

The irony is that the Lebanese brothers scored better on a grammar quiz that involved 10 sentences in which students were to change the tense of the verb and then were to create sentences from a list of 10 verbs and the desired tenses. I knew the second part would be more difficult than the first, so I scored them separately and used the second part as extra credit.

My daughter teaches high school Spanish and she says that many of her students score well on that sort of test but can not write a composition in Spanish. I have found that many of the American students totally freeze on tests or somehow have no idea how to classify things so that their scores are abysmal.

I would love to see foreign students spending a year in an English immersion version of the Ontario writing program Beth describes here.

These students are assessed but I think the tests are designed to place them out of ELL. I also taught high school level ELL classes and I thought the entire department at that school was chaotic. There were no year to year records kept and the ELL department did not communicate with the English department, to the detriment of the students.

Furthermore, some of the texts and translations used for ELL classes are terrible.

Recently, a squib somewhere suggested that high school kids are better off learning a foreign language the way babies learn their own languages, by beginning with the simplest forms. I have always bought Spanish language stories for children for my daughter to use with her classes whenever I have seen them for sale.

A colleague of mine who teaches Developmental Reading (a program that raises the reading level of students) formerly taught ELL. She said originally students were only taught grammar and that seemed to work better than the classes currently used.

I registered for the single teaching English as a second language course that Wayne State offered in the early 70s. It was useless. I dropped the course after having received a D for my first paper, a rather shocking event for me. I showed to a friend who then working on a doctorate in English who said my problem is I had written a "real paper" and had not written in "educationese."

When I was in high school, we had a few papers each year that we submitted as drafts which were corrected and rewritten. The nuns used journalist's editing codes to correct our papers. Since I was always in the first track, our classes had fewer papers submitted in draft form, but, even in graduate school, papers are submitted as drafts and rewritten. Teachers seem not to do this at some high schools and I wonder if it is because they are English education majors and not English majors.

I know why sentence diagramming was replaced but I would love to see it returned. Many of my colleagues agree with me. First of all, it is visual. Second, it is logical. When I first encountered text books for Developmental English, I was stunned that there were units pointing out to students that the subject of a sentence is never the object of a preposition. What a silly thing to teach, I thought. No one thinks that! Well, I blame the removal of diagramming for this error in reading. Correcting mistakes of this kind is a terrible slog. Teaching prepositions to people who are technically adults is difficult.

Analysis of a sentence need not be the traditional Catholic school diagramming. My kids went a Montessori elementary school where sentences were analyzed using a set of symbols and that worked just as well.

My daughter still encounters students taught to read by the whole word or the see it- say it method and those students tend do poorly in a second language.

Finally, the developmental English work area acknowledges that some students need more than one semester of each class in order to reach the college English level.

I 'm going to Detroit next week for the American Mensa Annual Gathering; what is the best restaurant in Detroit ?





David

the fifth year of high school is not necessarily English - the program is now called Ontario Advanced Placement

In my fifth year of high school, I took triple maths, chemistry and physics. I wasn't interested in any of the advanced language or social science courses.

I first coined the term "I hate plagiarizing" 30 yrs ago and since then it has been plagiarized to death.

Need a lawyer ?

That's funny.

Thanks for your response, POM.

My father is/was a writer, journalist and editor (of newspapers) and he drilled grammar into us all (or tried to). Not everyone took to it, but I did. I liked the logic of it. We were also taught grammar in school, but my kids didn't; however, they learned it when they learned French (they were both in French Immersion)... and they lived with it at home, so they learned it there, as well.

I notice, though, that much seems to be going out the window. Commonly, people begin sentences with conjunctions, end them with prepositions (well, that one has been happening for so long it sounds normal), saying 'her and I went to the store' seems to be becoming the norm... I continually find basic mistakes in newspapers, magazines, political propaganda, etc. I wonder if there's any point anymore in learning English grammar.

I wonder - do other languages have this problem?

I admire the both of you.. will read on, re handling it.

Thank you again. Truthfully, the last time I heard anything of Ontario schools was more than 30 years ago, making even the hearsay very out of date.

I don't know about other languages. My daughter speaks or reads a total of seven but has not been abroad for many years. She does communicate with European friends, so I will ask her.

I worked at the liquor store with a young woman who was a master's degree candidate in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She said, "Me and him will go out tonight." Drove me crazy. I always wondered if I should have corrected her and how. The how was in terms of tact.

My kids write well. They do not say, "me and him." While the older two went to Montessori School, the younger one did not. Fortunately, we lived in a community with a good school system. I also read to my kids, starting from when the oldest was about seven months old and ending when the youngest was 12. We attended the Unitarian Church in town which presented the kids with a thesaurus as an 8th grade graduation present. I gave each of them a copy of the MLA handbook when they started high school. I recently told my daughter that I find I am grateful to the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, something I thought I would never say. My daughter cited two teachers, one from her public high school and the other from the private school she attended for senior year.

As for sentences ending in prepositions, well, avoiding a final preposition sometimes creates a very wordy and awkward sentence. Prepositions are just one of the many banes to my existence that I face all too often. I tell my students that prepositions are "little words" that point out direction, time or space. That observation helps some but confuses others.

My youngest sister says "him and I went to the store" too and she knows it's wrong and doesn't care. She is an intelligent, thinking person, but it's just not important to her.

Another thing people do a lot is use redundancies, as in 8:00 a.m. in the morning

By the way, what is the use of "forewarning" or "advance warning"?

YES! Therein lies its value: grammar supports and manifests logic in the structural syntax of sentences.
That is acutely discerning of u, Mame. Few people have noticed that.
Tho I 've always thought well of u, in the face of your demonstrated insightfullness,
my assessment of your sagacity has ascended like a rocket in the night of the 4th of July.





That 's a pet peeve of mine, Mame. It offers a negative recommendation of the intellects of people who do it.
Obviously, u r innocent of that.
When thay do so, instead of writing a sentence, thay write a sentence fragment;
hence there is no logical reason to begin it with a captial,
nor to end it with a period, because it is NOT a sentence.

Sadly, this is a time-honored mistake that has persisted for centuries (literally).
I 've seen it in jurisprudential writings going back to the 1700s n thru the 1800s. Its sad.







One rule of English grammar that I refuse to impliment is the rule against splitting infinitive verbs
on the grounds that IN LATIN, the verb was one word. That is less than a stupid reason: it is no reason at all
and compliance therewith is a non-sequitur; i.e., the conclusion does not follow from its premises.

Have u noticed that a new error has become use of the neologism: "attendee" to express the concept of a person who attends?
Paradigmatically, the ee ending was female, receptive, such that an offeree is one to whom an offer is made.
A promisee is one to whom a promise is made,
whereas the er ending and the or ending have been used to signify one who DOES something, such as a singer, or a baker, etc.

Logically, the attendee is the HOST, at whose door the attender of a social occasion arrives.

I surmize that someone in the media probably fell into error
which became widely disseminated and was accepted into common parlance.
Logic demands that this error be eradicated (pulled up from the root).





David

Another frequent error is inconsistency in number within a sentence,
such as "there 's 3 dogs running in the street" instead of there r 3 dogs.





David