We recently met a student who was struggling in her first college-level English class. The student had worked hard on her first writing assignment, and thought she’d done everything she was supposed to do. She expected to earn an A...but the essay had come back from the professor with a C.
When we looked at her paper, the problem was immediately apparent. The essay asked the student to read closely and analyze a moment in the text. The student had done a good job of summarizing the text; she had pulled out moments she thought were important. But then she had used those moments to generalize about the characters, human responses to difficult situations, and humanity overall.
So we asked our student to look more closely at the text. She found some moments that intrigued her, worked through question-asking techniques, did some dialogic journaling and free writing, and produced some interesting work. She was engaged, absorbed in her project--right up to the end of the session. Then she asked a confounding question.
“But this is all about what’s in the text,” she said. “Anybody could find this. Isn’t what I said before more original?”
How had it come to this--that a smart, interesting student thought vague generalizations about the human condition were more “original” than ideas she’d come to after reading the text closely?
And what’s so important about originality, anyway?
Originality is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days in reference to student writing. The ease of finding essays on the internet means that plagiarizing is now as easy as right-clicking. Understandably, schools and colleges have mounted a full-on assault on cheating, often by using services like turnitin.com.
Students who submit their work to one of these tools quickly learn that any writing that reads like other writing out there in the world gets flagged as possible plagiarism. That sounds like a great idea--but in fact, for students who are trying to learn to write great essays, it’s a problem. After all, a lot of writing reads like other writing. A lot of ideas are had by more than one person (take, for example, the almost simultaneous “invention” of the light bulb by Thomas Edison and British scientist Joseph Swan.) A lot of students choose to focus on identical passages in well-known texts--not because they’re trying to pull a fast one but because those passages happen to be particularly interesting. And often, as any experienced teacher can tell you, a lot of students come to similar conclusions about what’s going on in those passages. That doesn’t mean they’re cheating--even if the plagiarism tool thinks it does.
But if a student tries out some ideas that come from reading the text closely, and a plagiarism tool flags her for cheating because some other student has also tried out those ideas in similar language….well, that student is not terribly likely to want to try that again. And she’s pretty likely to think that “originality” means saying something that’s never been said before.
That’s what our student was arguing: if there’s evidence to back up her claims, that means other people could also find that evidence. And if that’s the case, then her ideas--the analytical work she’s done--don’t really have any value, as she understands it. Better that she come up with vague, unsupported sentiments, drawn from her own life or general ideas, which can’t be tied directly to anything at all, and thus can’t be proven or disproven.
But here’s the thing: we think originality is being misunderstood. We think that the internet has led us to a redefinition of originality in terms of student writing. Where it used to mean, more or less, “work a student has done on her own,” now it seems to mean the production of “totally new ideas no one has ever had before.” This is a very high bar: lots of people have had lots of ideas for a very, very long time. As the Bible puts it, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” And it’s not how academia works, either. Academics build on one another’s work. That’s how a field progresses, be it medicine or English.
And we think that misunderstanding is getting in the way of students doing real, meaningful work. After all, students, are usually writing about well-known texts--texts people have been talking and thinking about for decades, if not centuries. A student who believes she needs to say something that has never ever been said before about, for instance, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” or Shakespeare’s “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” is going to have a hard time. To meet the “originality” test, she’s probably going to have to generalize, which means she’ll end up talking about something other than the text--or just making stuff up.
A student who sets out to discover something never before seen will either be paralyzed or have to revert to generalities, which is exactly what we don’t want students to do. And there’s a disconnect here between subjects. We wouldn’t expect a student in an engineering class to come to a never-before-seen way of working through a first-year lab experiment, or a math undergraduate to come up with an brand new formula to solve a problem. What we ask students to do when they work through math problems or labs, is to learn particular habits of mind, to sharpen their critical and analytical thinking skills, to get comfortable with asking questions and figuring things out. That’s also what we’re doing when we ask students to read texts closely. We want them to practice analyzing texts and ideas. We’d like them to know how to look at a book or an event or a painting (or a political speech or an advertisement) and ask questions about what they’re seeing. We don’t want them to take everything at face value. We want them to pull things apart, make use of evidence, come to reasoned conclusions. We want them to learn how to think hard.
When we ask students to write essays, we’re asking them to do all this work and then show us what they’ve discovered about the text. An essay, after all, is a record of a student’s thoughts about problems in the text. It shows her reading of those problems, and what she comes to understand about the text that she couldn’t comprehend before she did this analysis. If she’s done the work and asked useful questions and arrived at these thoughts herself, unaided by the internet (although possibly aided by class discussion, teacher and peer review, and other interactions and conversations about her work) then her ideas are original--even if other people have thought of those same ideas before, and expressed them in similar language, somewhere across time and space.