Topic Sentences

Directions: In groups of three or four, identify the topic sentence for each paragraph in the first three examples. In the last three examples, create a topic sentence for each paragraph.

1) Since most American colleges require one or more courses in freshman composition, those classes are the natural place for instruction in avoiding plagiarism. Some freshman composition courses do not attend to this matter, but by no means all of them. But even when the composition course does a careful job, that instruction must be enforced by other courses before students will take the message to heart. Furthermore, different disciplines following different systems for making citations, reflecting not just differences in format, but also in ways in which disciplines pose and solve problems and in what they accept as "common knowledge." Introductory course to any field should include instruction in the use of sources in that field, and advanced work should reinforce that instruction. Unfortunately, few departments bother to insure that such instruction and reinforcement occur, although there are some notable exceptions. *

2) McLeod also points out the particularly Western conception of authorship that makes it possible to steal language. Other cultures (for example Middle Eastern, Asian, African) cannot own ideas or words; language belongs to all. McLeod suggests that as our student populations become more diverse, the problem will cease to be a simple case of cheating but a far more complex conflict of epistemologies, values, and cultures. She cites Mike Rose's student Marita (in Lives on the Boundary), a hard-working student from the Los Angeles inner city, who lacks the cultural understanding and grasp of academic conventions that might have enabled her to avoid charges of plagiarism on one of her college papers (Rose 1989, 179-180). ***

3) Too many students stumble into plagiarism unawares, because they never have learned how to use sources properly, and sometimes even because they have been taught that research means plagiarism. Too-many high school students have earned good grades and their teachers' approval by copying from an encyclopedia or from other reference books. Too many college students quote, or reproduce without quotation marks, the words of printed courses as the substance of their papers because they have not learned that sources should support, not substitute, for their own ideas. *

4)__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________. A recent rash of plagiarism cases has sensitized academic institutions and learned societies to the problems and prompted some to adopt new and tougher policies. But many scholars, whistle blowers, and institutions say the handling of academic plagiarism remains uneven and, in many cases, ineffective. While there is no evidence to suggest that scholarly plagiarism is on the rise, some scholars say they are frustrated nonetheless because they think the academic community doesn't take seriously enough an offense that is the very antithesis of what scholars do. **

5)____________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________. Kolich points out that when students use the work of someone else and call it there own--particularly when they buy term papers or turn in articles cribbed from Time magazine--they display disrespect for the teacher and the academic institution (144); they breach a code of behavior relating to conventions of academic integrity (145); and they disregard the doctrine of original thinking to which our culture subscribes (145). ***

6)____________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________. Richard Murphy (1990) calls it "the cheating disorder" (898) and explores a case in which he accused a student of taking her paper from several popular women's magazines (although he could not find the source). After pressuring her into admitting that her paper was not her own, he discovered that he had bullied her into admitting to a crime she did not commit; the student's essay about a very personal experience with anorexia, was indeed her own. While for many teachers, unintentional plagiarism can be resolved through explanation and instruction about textual conventions (see for example, Elaie Whitaker 1993), for others, both unintentional and intentional plagiarism embroils teachers and theorists into a heated and emotional conflict of values. ***

* Excerpt from "Too Many Campuses Want to Sweep Student Plagiarism Under the Rug," by Edward M. White, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 24, 1993.

** Excerpt from "Critics Question Higher Education's Commitment and Effectiveness in Dealing With Plagiarism," by Caroline J. Mooney in The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 1992.

*** Excerpt from "Coming to Terms," by Darise Bowden published in the English Journal in April 1996.