20140812.0645

A friend of mine pointed out The Guardian's 8 August 2014 blog piece "Rogeting: Why 'Sinister Buttocks' Are Creeping into Students' Essays." (The "traditional" grammarian in me wants to point out that is should be "Is Creeping," since the phrase "Sinister Buttocks" is labeled as a phrase and thus as a singular item. The quotation marks serve to make it one thing. But that is something of an aside.) The piece is a mocking take on the plagiaristic practice of copying a text over and then changing words to some of their synonyms in the hopes of thwarting plagiarism-detection software or the eyes of vigilant instructors. The piece highlights the ludicrousness of the practice through offering examples of it at its most humorous, noting both that the practice leads to inarticulate nonsense on the page and that it leads to something that sounds much like expected business-speak. As a piece of satire, it works well--for those already inclined to think plagiarism a bad thing.

Not all do, of course. Obviously, some think it an acceptable practice, or they would not do it, and the article would have had no cause to be. Also, ideas of what does and does not count as plagiarism are in flux, as I have discussed repeatedly. (I tend to reject the idea of full freedom of use; I work at much of what I release into the world, and I would like to benefit from that work less ephemerally than the work alone allows. It will help me get to eat and to feed my daughter.) And I am sure that the question comes up for some who look at Rogeting of how those who do it cannot see the folly of the practice. Do they not know that what they do is wrong? Do they not know that the words on the page are incoherent drivel, rendered so by the multiple denotations of the words for which synonyms are found and the connotations of the synonyms deployed? The results are laughable--or would be did they not transgress as they do.

The answer to such questions, of course, is "no." Leaving aside the issue of "wrongness" for reasons noted above, the issue of incoherence merits attention. In my experience, students do not often review their work. (The assignment sequences in my composition classes call for multiple drafts, some of which I examine. Many students change nothing from draft to draft. They then wonder why their grades suffer.) This means that they do not read back over what they have written to see or hear if it works well, if it is both euphonious and sensible. More, many students operate with an...inaccurate idea of what is euphonious in the context for which they write. (As I may have noted before, although I cannot be sure,) I have known students to think that academic writing has to be a certain way, to use the biggest possible words to be able to sound as intelligent as it needs to be. This leads to what I call the Oswald Bates phenomenon, something akin to malapropism and not unlike the results of Rogeting. Those who engage in the practice likely think the text is improved by it, made to sound smarter through the use of "higher" diction. And I do not think it is an issue limited to students...