Using Reader-response Assignments to Combat Plagiarism

Proceedings of The 4th Global Conference on Education and Teaching

Year: 2023

DOI:

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Using Reader-response Assignments to Combat Plagiarism

Christopher Horger

ABSTRACT: 

Plagiarism in university writing courses has become pandemic. Detecting academic dishonesty is an exhausting and time-consuming pursuit for writing instructors. Too often students purchase papers online, and plagiarism detection software, designed to find matching text, fails against paragraphing software. Regrettably, many students have abandoned true invention and brainstorming in favor of easily accessible internet knowledge. In fact, using certain traditional writing assignments has become untenable since the topics can be harvested with ease from the net and detection is out of reach. There are, however, solutions to limit the frequency of this problem. By insisting on more personal writing, even within the realm of public discourse, and by including reader-response features in writing assignments, student dependence on borrowed text diminishes, while voice and authenticity emerge more fully.

keywords: Academic Writing, Authority, Autobiography, Teaching, Memoirs