Plagiarism Vs. Paraphrasing

I awoke this morning in my apartment and thought I was sleeping in a tent. I have no insulation in my ceiling, or my walls. It was cold. It was ten o'clock when my phone rang with The Professor on the other end explaining to me her battle with a sinus infection, and asking me to take the class on today. Her requests were simple:

1.) Go over plagiarism and paraphrasing. Apparently some of the students had difficulty paraphrasing in their final draft of paper number two. Instead of paraphrasing, they changed a few words and subsequently plagiarized. In the world of literature, plagiarism is not a more-or-less topic, you either have plagiarized, or you have not.

2.) Students were to hand in their third reflection piece today, and I was to go over their paraphrasing in those papers with them.

They were not heavy tasks for me to accomplish, and I feel I got them done appropriately. I began by getting students to give the class their definitions of paraphrasing and many of them explained that paraphrasing is simply not using a piece of text word for word. I sort of cringed at this. Unfortunately, I think this is what we teach students. More often then not, students think plagiarism is using an exact copy of part of a text; they don't seem to grasp the fact that in order to really paraphrase, they need to put the entire quote in their own words.

I put a quote on the board from the Funk article that students read for class the previous class and had them attempt to paraphrase it. The students that opted to share their paraphrasing had completed the task correctly, but I'm not sure of the students that didn't opt to share. The ones that share clearly have a grasp as they have the confidence to share with the class.

I then decided to explain to them how to go about paraphrasing. It is not the quickest technique, but it pretty much guarantees you won't exactly plagiarize. When we look at a quote, we need to glean the facts from it. If we can figure out the bare-bones facts that we are interested in we can do away with the quote and the language the author used. We then take these facts and put them into our own words, and make the connection using our own language. At this point, you should have a statement that doesn't mirror that of the original quote, but still contains the main ideas. Of course we need to reread the original quote and make sure ours is not the same, and even more importantly, we need to remember to cite. The ideas are not ours and therefore need a citation.

I also had the class exchange papers and read through them looking for paraphrasing/plagiarism as well as other grammar issues we had discussed in class - run-ons, comma splices, in-text citations, and comma usage. While this may not be full bore peer-editing, it is a beginning, and will eventually allow students to edit their own work more efficiently.