Shocked and Appalled

How to deal with this one? It’s not that these kids don’t know any better, but even when you explain it to them, they just don’t care.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

I used to think that they would start to care once they started writing, because after all, they wouldn’t want someone to take their stuff, would they? But now I don’t know.

The anthropologist quoted in the piece says that while she is disturbed by the high incidences of plagiarism,  to some degree this is due to a new style in writing, saying the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

But why does that mean you don’t have to cite your sources? Pastiche all you want, just give credit.