Avoiding ‘de-plagiarism’: Exploring the affordances of handwriting in the essay-writing process

This article discusses and challenges the increasing use of plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin and Grammarly by students, arguing that the increasingly online nature of composition is having a profound effect on student composition processes. This dependence on the Internet is leading to a strategy I term ‘de-plagiarism’, in which students copy/paste text into their essays and then ‘cleanse’ the text to avoid plagiarism detection. I then argue that this is being done in the context of an increasingly ‘de-authored’ writing environment, manifested by lack of formative writing development and anonymous marking, rendering the student invisible in the writing process. I then report on a phenomenon observed in class – namely that students who handwrote an exercise produced better, more original writing than those who typed, leading me to explore the affordances – via Bakhtinian notions of dialogicality and addressivity – of handwriting as a means of ‘re-authoring’ the essay-writing process.