Dr. Lee Skallerup and I are often on the same page. Sometimes it seems we are going through things at the same time.
My students are working on a research paper, the overview of controversy essay. In this paper the students must look at both sides of a single issue and present those two sides in a fair and even-handed way. I tell them I don’t want to know which side they support when I read this paper.
One thing that is consistently an issue, of course, is the time the students spend working on the paper.
When we begin the writing process, I tell my students it is going to take us a lot of time to write a good paper. It is why I introduce it in pieces and we do part of the drafting far ahead of the due date for the paper. I tell them that part of the reason for that is it gives them time to think about their topic a lot before they actually have to write the paper to turn in.
I had a lot of failures for plagiarism on this round of drafts. Even though the student worked on the papers and we practiced paraphrasing, they still kept the author’s words, without the requisite quotation marks. When they came in for their one-on-one conferences with me (possible only because so many have dropped), most of us have spent the whole fifteen minutes revising a single plagiarism. I tell them it takes time and they have to prepare for that.
They know that, but they haven’t done it.
Dr. Skallerup found time to be an issue for both success and failure.
I also pointed out the one important factor in their success: time. They took the time to work on their essays. The time and effort paid off, but they needed to understand that if they wanted to continue being successful in their essay writing, they needed to give themselves the time.
Learn what is the most difficult part of the writing process and start early enough to get that part done without panicking or rushing. Look at your schedule for the semester, and rather than blocking out the weekend before the essay is due, block off the one two weeks before it is due. Even if you’re not actively writing, at least plan to start thinking/reading/free writing/outlining on the topic.
Perhaps if we discuss more, as Dr. Skallerup has in her classes, how much time our work takes, they might see that we too take time and, when we don’t, that our work suffers. Modeling, after all, is one of my preferred and most successful methods of educating.
Aw, thanks for the shout-out! Thankfully, I haven’t really had to deal with the issue of plagiarism, intentional or unintentional, much. I don’t know if it’s because of the assignments I give or what, but that would be a frustrating process to go through, probably even more frustrating than my, what is your (meaningful) thesis?
Mostly, I just want to stop hearing about how my students obviously didn’t learn anything about writing from professors in other departments. They learned, but often they just don’t bother taking the time to put them into practice.
Transfer of knowledge is a skill/requirement my students do not understand. Unless it is a repeat of the same class, they have no idea how what they learn in my class applies to their next.
That’s why I do a whole discussion on that topic. Maybe it’s about time for that again.