I’ve just received a review of a paper written with a colleague on the topic of how plagiarism and mosaic writing are handled by science journal copyeditors and professional author’s editors (the latter are the sorts of editors one finds in “writing centers” but also elsewhere throughout the non-Anglophone world). This is the world of professional writing – not student writing – but it’s nonetheless “academic”.

 

A journal section editor (an experienced, distinguished non-native English speaking scientist), chatting with us, makes the point that one starts doing mosaic writing in English classes. We all know that researchers engage in “mosaic writing” – skillfully or not – but the interesting thing was that this editor/reviewer spontaneously mentions his English classes. One wonders, “What did the English instructor think or do at the time?”

 

I’ve long observed that pre-university English instructors in schools or language academies have a high tolerance for students’ copying of chunks. And of course memorizing dialogs is a time-honored practice. “Chunking” is even described as good-language-learning behavior for the spoken language. It’s not surprising that learners transfer that good behavior to writing. In fact, examination preparation classes for certain “certificate” exams abroad encourage the use of boilerplate language, with personal observations filling in the blanks. Indeed, we might examine whether corpus analysis encourages the re-use of large chunks or frees a learner from large “chunking” by showing an array of collocations and pattern alternatives.

 

On another listserve I belong to, it was also mentioned that university instructors do a lot of copy-paste compilation of documents these days – for their qualifying summaries and for many class handouts, which are sometimes re-used materials with new headings and no attribution. We don’t model attribution much, do we?

 

Here is what the editor/researcher said literally when he sent us the review of our paper:

 

In particular, the reviewer suggests that really small copy-paste plagiarisms should not be treated too severe for E2 authors. As one of such authors (I mean, E2 authors, not plagiarizing ones), I concur: I remember that while learning English, this was one of the tools to avoid too many (or severe) mistakes. Of course, I always tried to do as much revision as possible, but I can imagine a situation that a person with poor English and no one to help is simply afraid to edit “pretty sentences” (in such person’s eyes—you would call them correct sentences) too much.

 

Any comments?

 

1) Shouldn’t we make more of an effort to correctly mark the provenance of materials we take into the classroom?

2) Shouldn’t our teacher trainers be raising this point? (I can’t recall that mine did.)

3) Shouldn’t we begin to address the issue of idea and phrasing ownership in lower intermediate writing exercises?

4) Otherwise, don’t learners have to unlearn behaviors we’ve tolerated, even rewarded with “certificates” or good grades?