When I started teaching writing, I thought I knew what plagiarism was: it was submitting someone else's words or ideas as your own. It was wrong on two grounds: it was stealing another person's intellectual property and it was claiming achievement that you had not earned. Having been burned several times by students' submitting other people's work as their own, I was suspicious of any writing better than expected and angry at students who thought they could fool me so easily. Composition teachers, particularly teachers of first-year composition, are typically on the front lines of the battle against plagiarism. I was glad to be there.

Several years ago, however, as director of a writing program, I was asked by my dean to deal with a student who had repeatedly been caught, reprimanded, and punished for plagiarism throughout her first-year core classes. No one had the heart to kick her out of school; no cynical opportunist trying to grub a high grade on the cheap, this was a shy, sincere young woman, under great familial pressure to achieve, who just could not understand why it was wrong to copy ideas out of books or to let her brother-in-law, a physician, write her papers for her.

I tried all my standard explanations on her. First, I tried to convince her that she could not merely "steal" writers' words or ideas and present them as her own because college faculty members, writers themselves, simply cannot countenance intellectual theft. And, second, I tried to explain why she could not let her brother-in-law compose for her; such reliance on outside help kept her from learning a skill necessary for professional survival. She was not convinced. If, she miserably countered, the books she was copying from were true, how could we object to her reiterating the truth to us; if they were not true, how could they have been published? If students were allowed, even encouraged, to do collaborative work in class, if such collaborations reflect real-world writing situations, why could she not collaborate with her brother-in-law at home-particularly if such collaboration resulted in strong, successful papers?

This student's case has become for me a prototype for understanding the issues that writing teachers face in teaching students to avoid plagiarism, issues that seem to have become much more complicated in the past few years, as our understanding of writing has shifted focus from the individual writer to the discourse community. In a writing class or a writing program, the question of plagiarism is highly problematical. Writing teachers are only beginning to come to terms with the problems.

Clearly, my definitions of plagiarism were inadequate. Plagiarism is not really stealing, since we would still consider it plagiarism for a student to be given (or to purchase) the right to present someone else's paper as her own. Furthermore, the issue of fair attribution is not simple or stable; it differs from discipline to discipline, and from high school to college to graduate school to profession. For example, in high school, students typically learn to footnote "facts"; in college, most of these facts are relegated to the realm of "common knowledge," which need not be footnoted. "Ideas;' however, do need to be footnoted, even though few first year students fully comprehend what an idea is and why it may be important. Which ideas need to be footnoted then changes as students advance in a field. Some ideas are really "common knowledge": suppose we needed a citation every time we mentioned something like calculus or Plato's cave.

There simply is no single rule that can be taught in first-year composition and applied to all writing situations. But when I tell students that what needs to be attributed varies from context to context and from point to point in their careers, I have no really good answer to the question, inevitably raised, about how to figure out where you are in that progression and whether your teacher or supervisor thinks you are at the same place.

The problem is even more complicated, however, as the student above indicated when she raised the issue of "truth." In most fields, rhetoric and composition studies included, common knowledge in the field is compressed into textbooks and purveyed as "truth.” at least as far as the student can see. Only some textbooks, typically in fields like rhetoric or communications, use endnotes or indicate that they are presenting the author's version of the discipline. Textbooks in the sciences and engineering typically claim, explicitly or implicitly, that the information they contain is true. Ordinarily, in turn, students expect textbooks to tell them what they need to know, and they expect to be evaluated on their ability to repeat that information as accurately as possible.

I used to tell students that whenever they submit someone else's words or ideas as their own it is plagiarism. But that is exactly what I ask students to do when they take tests: to repeat, usually without attribution, the ideas learned from the textbook and class lectures. On a recent exam, for example, I asked students to define terms like “species.” "uniformitarianism,” and "natural theology" without any suggestion of "according to whom." I do not think I am alone or, for that matter, that I am wrong. Because of all this undocumented passing back and forth of information that goes on in the college classroom, I can see where my troubled student's confusion came from, even if I am still not willing to accept her naive conception of "truth."

It is not only this passing back and forth of information that makes the concept of plagiarism problematic in the writing classroom. In the past decade composition teachers have been moving from the "Romantic" model of writing as individual self-expression to a collaborative model of writing for and with a discourse community. Responding to research that indicates that most workplace and professional writing is collaborative, many writing teachers are fostering group activities at various stages of the writing process. Thus, writing instructors set up peer groups to discuss and generate topics, to revise and edit drafts of papers, and even to share research and compose drafts. Some writing instructors themselves participate in student writing by commenting on first drafts of papers that are then rewritten for a grade. Given this move toward collaborative, student-centered learning, fewer composition instructors are willing to serve as plagiarism police. And given this turn toward a process-oriented, collaborative approach to writing, issues of "fair help" and acknowledgement become issues understood only by seeing shades of gray.

My prototypical plagiarist disabused me of the notion that I could solve the problem of plagiarism by a quick definition and severe penalties. I have rethought my composition courses to sensitize students to the difference between their own voices and those of the writers they read and to give students practice at incorporating the ideas of others into their papers. I have built into my courses continual practice in citation and documentation, so much so that one first-year student observed: “At the beginning of the semester we all plagiarized and falsified without knowing it. Now we have learned to give credit when credit is due and to try to relay the correct information with summaries, quotes, and paraphrases." At the same time, I encourage collaboration of all sorts, both in class and out, continually raising the question of when collaboration crosses the line into exploitation or evasion of responsibility. In class, as in life, the students have to defend their decisions, and to live with them.

Plagiarism is not, as all educators know, a problem only in composition classes. While few would disagree about the ethics of buying term papers, when we get into issues of collaboration and common knowledge, the consensus breaks down. The unfolding debate over the accusations of plagiarism against University of Massachusetts historian Stephen B. Oates has exposed serious disagreement among senior members of the profession about what constitutes plagiarism. The best approach for the teacher of writing, and indeed for the teacher of any subject that requires or uses writing, is to admit and discuss the complexity of the problem of plagiarism, and to do so repeatedly. We cannot just assume that "everyone knows" what plagiarism is, nor can we assume that even if it is defined in first-year composition, the lesson will "take:" Cases like Oates' can be used to show students what is at stake in defining plagiarism and to establish a working definition for a particular class of acceptable and unacceptable use of sources and help. The provisional nature of such a working definition is, I think, not only acceptable but desirable.