Lyudmila's post on plagiarism

I started to hear the word ‘plagiarism’ when in the 90s Russian singers would imitate U.S. or other Western singers. Then, later I came across with this issue when I first needed to produce an essay in an American college. Plagiarism sounded like a scary word to me as I was not sure how much I could take from the sentence. I remember exhaustingly trying to produce non plagiarized pieces while having not received appropriate information how to do it. I can see how “ignorance and lack of experience, rather than culture, lead to unorthodox textual borrowing” (Casanave, 177). I am glad to hear that we are supposed to use the words and ideas of others while integrating them into our own texts and still managing the piece to be original. The ambiguities in the Western notion of plagiarism are obvious as teachers themselves just vaguely explain it. Instead, more instruction, practice, and explanation is needed on behalf of teachers. In particular, organizing discussions on “the complexities of authorship, notions of originality and plagiarism, and cross-cultural practices of textual borrowing” will raise students’ awareness on the issues concerning textual borrowing. In addition, such exercises as true-false statements which expect answers on the context of the author’s teaching both in students’ countries and in the U.S., open-ended questions about students’ experiences on using source texts and their own interpretation of author and intellectual property, and the purposes of citation practices in English-language academic contexts provide will help students to reflect on their own as well as Western writing (Casanave, p. 183). These are crucial practices that will provide opportunities for writing students to see that the term “plagiarism” is a complex notion, and it relates to “the cultural construction of human identity, [and thus,] accusations of plagiarism may all too easily mask ideological arrogance” (qtd. in Pennycook, 218).