The main form of plagiarism I have encountered is students reusing their own work for more than one class. It's almost impossible to guard against this. Sometimes they even ask if they can do this -- the culture of reusability.
It makes good economic sense to recycle existing information rather than to reinvent the wheel -- so in many ways our students' behaviors make better economic sense than the traditional writing pedagogies that focus on original authorship. However, in this culture of reusability (aka filesharing, aka single sourcing), the writer needs to learn two important skills: 1. When and how to credit labor/effort and to acknowledge copyright -- and those are two different things. Though copyright maximalists like to blur that distinction, I think it is important to maintain it. In most business contexts, it is not a copyright violation to recycle boilerplate from an existing report (the company owns the copyright, after all, under the work-for-hire doctrine). However, it can pose ethical problems if an employee tries to "steal labor credit" from another employee. 2. When and how to adapt existing information for next contexts, audiences, circumstances. "Mere copying" or redistribution is seldom rhetorically effective. The writer has to learn how to reshape, adapt, redesign information for suitability elsewhere. Recycling one's own work done in a previous academic context is neither plagiarism nor a copyright violation (unless the copyright was assigned to someone else). However, it might be an act of "academic dishonesty" (yet another category) nonetheless, depending on how that is defined by a given institution and by a given instructor. Jim Porter ------------------------------- James E. Porter Co-Director, WIDE Research Center Writing in Digital Environments Olds Hall 7 Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 porterj8@msu.edu office: 517.353.7258 fax: 517.353.9162 http://wide.msu.edu/ -----------------------------------------