English 495: Tuesday, February 15

Is anything entirely original? That was the question I was left with after the day's readings. Not really any answers, just this one large, lingering question. I have found myself many times this semester thus far looking at my own beliefs on things and realizing that those beliefs can only be characterized as ethnocentric. However, I have not held on to these beliefs because I truly believe in the wonderfulness of this ethnocentricism, so-to-speak; rather, I find that I am simply much less educated in topics related to writing than I thought I was.

Despite my utmost adherence to the Western standards of what plagiarism is, I doubt much of what I've ever written is that unique, that original. Many of my academic papers are filled with quotation borrowing, which, although cited, still account for ideas which were not mine to begin with. I'm sure the original thoughts of mine were somehow, somewhere written kind of like someone else.

I think that, in my head, the issue of plagiarism comes down to motivation. Why did he or she copy the text in the first place? A cultural practice is a mucher different reason than a lazy college student copying down chunks of text word for word because he or she procrastinated. The readings today reminded me of one instance when I was in fourth grade, connecting to that idea of motivation. That year in school, my teacher asked my class to write "how to" reports, basically explaining how or what something is to the class. My constantly striving to overachieve self chose the large topic of Greek Mythology, something my dad had introduced me to only a few days before that. I found the stories and beliefs extremely interesting. I read and read and read, wrote and wrote and wrote. The paper ended up being about 15 pages, extremely long for a fourth grader. I had written the introductions into many of the stories, but I had basically copied some of my favorite stories down word for word to read to the class. I had no idea that what I was doing was considered plagiarism in the Western sense. Luckily, I had a great teacher who said nothing about what I'm sure she knew was "plagiarism." She let me read my entire report, and I did well on it. Ultimately, though, I also learned a lot. I'm sure that one could have asked to recite one story, and I could have said it by memory. Pennycook states at one point that memorization through repetition (as I had read, reread, copied each story) "can be used to deepen and develop understanding" (222). I think in my case, and I'm sure in many others, this tactic of copying helped a great deal.

Yet that still doesn't answer my original question:  Is anything really original?