- Knit top. A sparkly, seventies-style, Lurex-infused knit top a la Missoni. Wear with worn jeans and a bold necklace for a fresh-from-the-set-of-the-OC brand of date-worthy chic.
-Recess, "Top Five Fall Trend Investments," 9/22/05
Alright, I cave.
Back in September, I advised readers of this University's weekly arts publication to invest in Lurex. I invested in Lurex. I bought a seventies-esque Lurex dress. It was going to be Mischa-ly glamorous. Its stretchiness was going to enable me to look cute while roller skating to ABBA (A*Teen?) and Kylie.
It seems that Lurex tanked.
Yesterday, I gave my personal investment into the Lurex trend to Good Will. Dancing Queen I'll never be, for I hath doffed her robes.
But even if I've decided natural fibers make for smarter ventures, I'm proud those words in the Sept. 22 issue of Recess-the silly, tweenage, note-the-OC-reference words that in many senses make me cringe-are entirely my own. I recommended you Lurex. I wrote to you, pitching you Lurex. The fact that I wrote about Lurex will follow me wherever I go, part of a digital paper trail sticking to my resume like a scraggly yank of gas station toilet paper.
I say all this because to author your own words in this day and age-and to have your nonfiction work to be entirely, well, nonfictional-deserves laudatory physical contact (read: a hearty handshake). Revisit the stories of our unlucky contestants: author James Frey, Harvard undergraduate and apparently unoriginal novelist Kaavya Viswanathan and the most recent addition to the bunch, University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Ward Churchill. Churchill is at the center of a controversy marring CU for allegedly fabricating and plagiarizing his research.
My youngest sister is a freshman in high school and, as a part of a school pilot program, totes an issued Dell laptop around with her to the bus stop every morning. The good news: My kid sister, unlike the thousands of suckers who will take the MCAT this year, will be entirely comfortable with computerized, standardized testing, as she's already subjected to it weekly. In the ninth grade, "scratch paper" is an obsolete term.
She can also navigate Blackboard and do the whole digital dropbox thing. I was amazed, given that only about 50 percent of my smarty-pants professors have proficient enough mousemanship to work either of these programs.
Controls are of course in place on all the school-issued laptops, preventing the 14-year-old from ogling Pam's watermelons or Googling bomb ingredients. But there are serious detriments to the program. With access to Internet when they're writing papers, doing worksheets or answering questions from their online textbooks, some teachers things there's more opportunity to plagiarize and cheat than ever before.
"Before there was termpaper.com or whatever, kids used to copy things straight out of books," an old English teacher of mine told me Tuesday. "It's just easier and more common now that there's Internet."
"Yeah," another added from across the English department lounge. "One of my kids couldn't write a decent sentence in any in-class essay assignment, but turns in this dissertation on why Pope John Paul II's papal legacy is exemplar of postmodernist theory. It happens all the time."
Everybody cool hates a Pollyanna, but I can't help but hope my generation isn't filled with a bunch of unoriginal "copiers" (credit for the word, since we're being honest here, goes to Michael Cushmac from second grade).
I asked Mary Wells about plagiarism, and her response surprised me. Before anything she writes at home is considered eligible for grading or submission to the teacher, she has to send it to a nonprofit plagiarism website. The site checks Mary Wells' 10-page report on landed gentry in the Renaissance against its database, marking the paper as fraudulent should it find a similar work in its annals. This is great news for teachers, who have a slightly shorter list of things to check for now when grading.
But it also disappoints me. Are our youngest students not trusted to write honest book reports any more?
I can't decide whether to be elated that teachers, in valiant efforts to improve our school system and enhance the abysmal writing "skills" of our high school kids, are combating plagiarism at its first. This is, I suppose, the definition of nipping it in the bud. It would be a less egregious act if Mary Wells borrowed her Renaissance paper from Encarta than if a Harvard undergraduate copied an entire novel (check out The Crimson's coverage for a passage-by-passage comparison between the novels in question). Viswanathan has been vetted by Harvard's undergraduate admissions office. Mary Wells, while ultimately the responsible and punishable party, could feasibly blame her transgression on the malfeasance of Virginia public school education.
No matter what the severity or at what age a writer plagiarizes, it is still a matter of taking personal responsibility. If I can take personal responsibility for temporarily endorsing Lurex, then owning up to such ethical transgressions shouldn't break the backs of any already stooping to such lows.
Sarah Ball is a rising Trinity junior and features editor for The Chronicle. Her column runs every Thursday during the summer.
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