This talk was composed for the Qatar Teaching and Learning Forum, on the topic of “Encouraging Student Authenticity in Writing.” I was part of a panel responding to recent articles about contract cheating. Full disclosure: I self-plagiarized a few sentences from one of my own articles.

I always feel a little guilty on the first day of class. I talk about my plagiarism policy, but the plagiarism policy on my syllabus is sandwiched between two paragraphs which were straight up copy-pasted from my institution’s policies. 

I’ve conducted a study on plagiarism in conference abstracts. You want to know who most often plagiarize conference abstracts? Maybe graduate students, some of whom are just now learning advanced disciplinary conventions and citation methods? It would be kind of understandable. No, it’s FULL PROFESSORS who ring up the high scores on Turnitin, most often because they self-plagiarize their own work and submit it as a new paper. They should know better, right? 

So I’d like to note that we could have gathered today for an alternative panel on Encouraging Authenticity in PROFESSOR writing. 

But we are here to talk about students, so I will note that one of my first principles of encouraging authenticity is to point out when it is perfectly ok, even preferable, to NOT be authentic. I teach technical writing, and to my knowledge, Qatar Petroleum does not want its new engineers running around putting all of their policies “in the student’s own words.” They want graduates to use what we call boilerplate text – text that you use verbatim; unauthentic text. 

Deborah Brandt studied workers who are ‘ghostwriters’ – people who, as part of their work, write speeches, policies, letters, reports, and other documents that are never acknowledged as the author of their work, much like the author or authors who wrote the policies on my syllabus. She concludes that “when it comes to writing, people’s expressive voices seem inevitably tangled with interests and liabilities of the organizations that employ them – and often cannot be comfortably extricated even off the job” (p. 164). In simpler terms, ghostwriters were proud of their words, even as those words were credited to others. They took great care in blending their individual voice with the voice of their employer. 

If we aim to prepare our students for work in the neoliberal corporate world – and we are remiss if we don’t acknowledge the reality that academia is largely such a world – we need to prepare students to be ghostwriters. 

What I think is important here is not to demonize these practices. As I hope I’ve pointed out, we as faculty members are implicated in and participate in practices that we don’t necessarily want to see in our students. What this looks like in my classroom is that when I analyze texts with my students, we talk about how, in the words of Leslie Seawright, documents in both the workplace and academia “accrue power for writers and readers, and […] are used for ideological purposes as well” (96). I show them chains of writing – what once was an email to me becomes part of my email back, and then that becomes an abstract that I submit to an editor, who provides feedback that shapes my first draft and on and on. I think it was Bakhtin who said something about how our mouths are full of other people’s words, but I couldn’t find that quotation when I googled it, so maybe I misremember it. 

Some technological tools for academic integrity are used for ideological purposes as well, and that’s why I won’t use Turnitin. Although it bills itself as a plagiarism prevention service, Turnitin, as a text-matching software, cannot distinguish between properly cited quotations and plagiarism (Purdy, 2005), nor can it detect if another writer has been paid to write the submission, and it does not often flag patchwriting, or when the writer changes a few words in a quoted phrase. Essentially, it can’t do more than a professor who Googles a few phrases here and there. Turnitin’s internet database, more than 45 billion webpages, is roughly the same size as that of popular search engines, over 49 billion webpages, which are free for any internet user (Turnitin, 2016; de Kunder, 2016). Turnitin uses this database to sell themselves to universities; however, this database has a large population of student writers who did not provide informed consent – their professors required them to submit their original work to a company that then makes money off of the students’ intellectual labor. 

My biggest problem is that Turnitin and programs like that is that students are presumed guilty before they are proven innocent – well, maybe innocent with 15% guiltiness. 

Some of you may have been thinking earlier, “Well, I have much higher goals for my students than to be the next cog in the corporate machine – writing is for expression of ideas and exploring what it means to be human!” Well, I agree with you, too, and this is where my second principle of encouraging authenticity comes in. I can refuse to adopt practices of the police state and start with the premise that writing in university needs to be meaningful to students. 

The authors of The Meaningful Writing Projectoffer compelling evidence that the kind of writing that sticks with students – across all disciplines – are assigned by faculty who encourage student agency, engagement, and transfer of learning. Meaningful writing assignments, they observe, invite students to

• Tap into the power of personal connection 
• See what they’re writing as applicable, relevant, real world, and connected to their future selves 
• Immerse themselves in what they’re thinking, writing, and researching, including engagement in processes of writing (p. 108-109). 

This week, what that looks like in my first-year writing course is that students are emailing me their ORQs – original research questions – that they will then use as a basis for a series of interview questions (another small assignment that will be recorded in their research journals). They will ask these interview questions and write up their findings in a report, which I will see probably 2-7 drafts of, depending on the student and how much they want an A. 

Designing meaningful assignments and scaffolding them into shorter, manageable but also somewhat challenging stages helps my students see how they can do writing that seems out of their league. I want my students to be like ghostwriters: confident that they can tackle ANY writing assignment that comes their way, whether at university or in the workplace. 

I gave this speech at the 2018 Best Writing launch party in 2018, where we celebrated the newest edition called “Stories We Live By.”

Since this year’s theme for Best Writingis “Stories We Live By,” I thought I’d tell you one of my stories that has led me to be here.

When I was growing up, I loved spending time with my grandparents at their farm. I especially loved being with my grandmother, who seemed to know how to do everything – milk cows, gather hidden chicken eggs, grow plants from a single leaf. I adored her and wanted to be like her. 

Until one day, when I saw the grocery list she had made. Almost every word was misspelled. “Carrot” was spelled “carot,” “bread” was spelled “bred.” These were simple words that even I at 8 years old knew how to spell. I was crushed that my hero couldn’t write well, and I made fun of her errors.

What I didn’t know then was that the misspelled words on that grocery list was a source of shame for my grandmother. She didn’t go to school after 4^thgrade and never graduated from elementary school, much less a university like the one we stand in today. She was married at 13 and had three children by sixteen – the same year her husband died. 

The story I live by is that no one else should ever have to be ashamed of their writing like my grandmother was. I am here at university because she couldn’t be, and because she would have wanted me to appreciate the many gifts – including the gifts of multi-literacies – that every individual has.

We need stories to live by. Stories explain why we exist here on Earth or why we attend TAMUQ. Stories remind us of what kind of person we want to be, and they tell us what we are like at our worst. 

I encourage you to listen to the following student authors for the ways in which they tell us truths about each individual human spirit. These are volunteers who are speaking to you tonight, people who are answering a higher call than a professor assigning an essay. 

They are telling you the stories that we live by. 

Every Friday morning, I watch a group of workers play cricket in an empty construction lot. In Doha, the sunrise pierces through the darkest of curtains at a truly ungodly hour, and I can’t sleep. I stumble into the kitchen, punch the buttons on the coffeepot, and sip my coffee while I contemplate my plans for the day. Should I call a friend for brunch? Go shopping at a mall? Which mall haven’t I visited in awhile? What about the souq or a road trip out of the city? Or should I curl up on the couch and binge-watch a TV show? Maybe I could pull out my laptop and do some work – surely there’s a deadline bearing down on me.

The workers must have woken before dawn in order to get to my part of town while the heat is still bearable – around 90F during the summer, and that’s nothing compared to how hot it will be by the afternoon.  Once, I saw them line up neatly in a row as if to number off and create new teams, but usually they’ve already started a match by the time my coffee is ready. Each man’s swing of the bat sets the other players in motion. The dust kicks up as a worker sprints across the lot, racing towards (from?) a tiny speck of a cricket ball. I can’t hear their shouts from where I stand, but several wave their arms enthusiastically. Even as the temperature inches upwards in the heat of midday, the match doesn’t lose any intensity.

I don’t see the end of these games, when the men board a bus back to their crowded camps, eat some dal and rice around the communal cookfire, rest in preparation for the six-day work week, and probably relive some key plays of the day’s match. I’ve finished my coffee and have chosen how I’ll spend my weekend. I have no idea how you play cricket, and I doubt I’ll ever really understand.