'Analog vs Digital' War Studies: Crossover Vol. 1, Plagiarism

For a while now I have taken to referring to 'on-line' learning and/or students as 'digital' and 'non-on-line' learning and/or students as 'analog' (ie., like digital computing as opposed to wind-up analog clockwork). I confess that the meme hasn't exactly caught on in the educational literature which persists in attaching 'e-' in lieu of 'on-line', which has the benefit of brevity (e-Learning, e-Student, etc) but seems to me somehow a little inelegant. And refers to 'normal', 'non-on-line' learning and/or students as 'face-to-face', which I do not like because it takes too long to type, has a faint connotation of confrontation ('in your face!' but perhaps that's just me), and when shortened to 'f2f', as it sometimes is, just looks from an esthetic perspective, well, horrible. So when I say 'Digital War Studies' what I mean is: us, which is to say you reading this. And when I say 'Analog War Studies' what I mean is the live bodies who occasionally knock on my door here on The Strand and whom I could, if the notion took me, poke and/or prod in the flesh.

Teaching both 'analog' and 'digital' I notice that there is some useful crossover. Case in point: yesterday I was asked to give a talk on 'Plagiarism' to this year's cohort of analog MA students at their Orientation session. This talk is meant to be over and above what isalready said in the Handbook. I had 15 minutes to fill and was feeling a little challenged as to what to say else as the Handbook is pretty clear on what plagiarism is, that it's considered the most serious academic misdemeanour and that when it's discovered it generally means the perpetrator is expelled from the programme. Pretty cut and dry, I thuoght. So I tried to be a bit more proactive and positive in my talk and explain why it was taken so seriously (unless that was not obvious) and how it could be avoided, which it is worth repeating here.

Plagiarism is considered such a serious offence in academia because it is effectively a form of theft and fraud. It's not a 'victimless' crime. Genuinely original, genuinely good ideas actually come along fairly rarely. When you've had one and gone to the effort of systematically working through it, relating it to other ideas, and saying something useful about your field with it--which is basically what it means to write an academic article and have it published in a peer-reviewed professional journal--then it is pretty seriously annoying to have it used by someone else as if it were their own. Perhaps in the case of most student essays which have been plagiarized this would seem not to matter for they are not published and so, it could be argued, there is no diminishing of the kudos owing to the originator because he/she will never know about it. This does not change the principle, however, which is that a theft has occurred. We could get into a philosophical discussion here along the lines of, you know, 'if a tree falls in the forest...' But that's unnecessary coffee-talk because there is another transgression involved in plagiarism which is that the plagiarist misrepresents his or her actual intellectual abilities in a way that, if it goes undetected and unpunished, will eventually undermine the integrity of the degree awarded.

What I find disappointing in a lot of cases of minor plagiarism which I see the root cause is a quite unnecessary lack of confidence and tendency of new academic writers to second-guess the effectiveness of their own words and thinking. Bear in mind:

•It is almost always better to use your own words. It may seem that what another has written is so much more eloquent than what you have. And indeed that may be the case. But what an examiner is looking for before he begins to judge an argument on the basis of felicity of expression and style is to understand the underlying thinking which is more often than not obscured when you use someone else's words than your own. Yes it may sound better but the meaning and rhetorical impact can be less. I don't know how many times I have put big red question marks beside a paragraph in a student's essay which has been 'shaped' strongly by someone else's manner of explaining a point that when I ask them to explain 'but what do you really mean?' in person they do so easily and clearly.

•Acknowledging the source of ideas does not diminish your own brilliance. On the contrary, it shows a fluency with the literature and the key concepts within it that demonstrate it very clearly.

•The more provocative the point made the greater the burden of proof required—and vice versa. What this means is that there is no 'magic number' of footnotes for an essay of a given length--a relatively common student fallacy. If my paper is 3,000 words long how many footnotes does it need to have to be considered 'good'? Unfortunately, there's no answer. In theory, one could have an excellent paper which had no footnotes or very, very few because it was wholly composed of the student's original thuoght. In practice, never. Knowledge advances by building upon itself so even original ideas need contextualizing in the literature which means referring to others whether to rubbish them or salute them. And furthermore, unlike, say, philosophy the social sciences are really not given to wholly abstract arguments. You're almost always talking about something in the Real World and in order to construct a convincing argument about something in the Real World you need to have way of quantifiably measuring it or qualitatively describing it. In other words, you need data, proof, and the more 'way out there' what you're saying is the more of it you have to have.

•And, finally, no one loses marks for excessive footnoting! You may get marginal comments along the lines of 'is this really necessary?' when you provide a footnote to the Oxford Companion to Military History for the sentence 'The First World War began in 1914' (to give a silly, extreme example), after which you will adjust your notions of what needs footnoting and what does not in order to make a convincing original argument. Getting good at that in whatever your chosen subject may be is, in a nutshell, what being a student is all about.

Really egregious cases of plagiarism, on the other hand, always seem to come down to sheer laziness often, but not necessarily, accompanied by ineptitude in which case there really is no excuse.