Make Your Paraphrasing Plagiarism Proof With a Coat of E-Prime

I WOULD LIKE TO DEDICATE this article to the memory of my late friend and mentor, D. David Bourland, Jr. I think he would have derived tremendous satisfaction from knowing that one of his disciples had found yet another use for the E-Prime extensional device. In my opinion the biggest scourge to the English teacher (or any teacher for that matter) consists of the perennial epidemic of plagiarism, which occurs all too frequently in our schools, colleges, and universities. I have taught English for over 35 years in public and private schools, community colleges, business colleges, state colleges and universities, as well as several church-related colleges. Whether appealing to the Judeo-Christian ethic (Exodus 20:15) or stressing the legal ramifications of academic burglary, I have never had one plagiarism-free semester. Recently, however, I have had huge success in my freshman and Advanced Composition classes at Wiley College incorporating a series of paraphrase clinics using E-Prime as a major paraphrasing strategy. Plagiarism, I inform the class, consists of taking someone else's words and passing them off as one's own. The most egregious form of plagiarism consists of lifting an entire article or book manuscript and passing it off as one's own. Partial or a la carte plagiarism consists of simply changing the tense or the voice of the sentence, substituting past tense verbs for present tense verbs, passive for active voice, removing an occasional adjective, making the manuscript appear somewhat different from the original, or simply substituting synonyms without really understanding the sense of the passage. I generally begin my paraphrase clinics by telling a personal story of the guilt I felt when my eighth grade English teacher gave me an A+ on a paper I had plagiarized, pinning it to the bulletin board next to my desk, leaving it there for three weeks. My ears often glowed crimson during that display. I then go on to routine problems of lead-ins and in-text page citations, stressing the need to include introductory phrases such as, According to Smith or the generic One authority states for every piece of documentation, whether pr6cis, summary, paraphrase, or direct quotations. I emphasize that page numbers also need to be used for every borrowed entry, including Web sources, reminding the students that when they download the article as hard copy, page numbers magically appear. As the students have acquiesced to the idea of proper documentation, I take them through a sentence-combining workshop in which they learn concision in their writing by replacing relative clauses and subordinate clauses with participial phrases or prepositional phrases, and replacing phrases with single word qualifiers or punctuation. Students go through exercises splicing clauses with relative pronouns, participial phrases, or other such modifying devices. I then take the students through an extemporaneous fluency exercise developed by my late speech Professor, Dr. Edward Palzer, who demonstrated that from one compound complex sentence, a student can get up to ten variations. The student makes variations by changing the word order, breaking it up into shorter sentences, using subordinating devices such as subordinating conjunctions, participles, or other subordinating, modifying devices, or finding synonyms. After we have begun the research paper unit, the students having selected their topics and framed the tentative thesis, I then distribute paraphrase worksheets which the students fill out every Friday, six weeks before the due date. I emphasize to the students You can write a research paper in twenty but you can't write a research paper in twenty hours, explaining the conundrum by suggesting that the students cannot coalesce the hours together, but they must intersperse them over a period of time allowing plenty of time for rest and recharging the nerve batteries. Paraphrasing, I remind them, takes a great deal of cerebral energy. …