Beyond Plagiarism: Transgressive andNontransgressive Intertextuality

Ranamukalage ChandrasomaUniversity of Technology, Sydney

Celia ThompsonUniversity of Melbourne, Victoria

Alastair PennycookUniversity of Technology, Sydney

The debate about what constitutes plagiarism and how it should be dealt with inthe academy continues to gain momentum. The response from many higher educa-tion institutions is to channel ever-increasing amounts of resources into plagiarismdetection technologies, rather than trying to ascertain why plagiarism might be oc-curring in the first place. In this article, drawing on a wide range of data from stu-dent assignments and interviews with staff and students, we argue that it would bepreferable to do away with the notion of plagiarism in favour of an understandingof transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Once textual borrowings areseen in this light, we are more able to focus on the crucial issues of writing, iden-tity, power, knowledge, disciplinary dynamics, and discourse that underlieintertextuality. We conclude that judgements about the nature of intertextuality arecontextually contingent; they should also be understood as part of a broader ac-count of institutional regulation and student resistance, interdisciplinarity, and themediation of discourse.

Key words: plagiarism, intertextuality, writer development, interdisciplinarity,interdiscursivity

There are three central arguments we wish to highlight at the outset. First, withnew and changing technologies providing writers access to vast textual re-

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EDUCATION, 3(3), 171–193Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Alastair Pennycook, Faculty of Education, City Campus,P.O. Box 123 Broadway, Sydney, Australia NSW 2007. E-mail: alastair.pennycook@uts.edu.au

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sources, plagiarism is considered an ever-increasing practice and problem,1 agrowing threat to the integrity of the academy (F. Hyland, 2001, p. 376). Univer-sities are seeking out new and better ways to detect plagiarism with ever moreresources being put into the development of plagiarism detection software pro-grams. The best known is the program that can be found at the U.S.-based Website, http://www.plagiarism.org. However, in the United Kingdom, an electronicdetection system can be obtained from the Web site, http://www.iparadigms.com.This system is recommended for use by the nationwide Further and HigherEducation Joint Information Systems Committee. In Australia, theASSESS+COPICAT system (see Buckell, 2003) is being piloted for futureuse. The fact that so much attention has been given to plagiarism both in theacademy (Briggs, 2003; Decoo, 2002; Howard, 1995; Maslen, 1993; Price,2002; Schroeder, Welch & Howard, 1996) and in the print media (Illing, 2003;Ketchell, 2003; Sullivan, 2002) is not only indicative of the degree of interestthat this topic generates but is also a measure of the divisions in opinion that ex-ist both within the international academic community as well as in the generalpopulation regarding exactly what kind of writing practices might constitute pla-giarism in the first place, and second, how best to deal with these practices at thelevels of both policy and pedagogy.

Second, we argue that the use of the concept “plagiarism,” although possiblyuseful to identify certain base acts of presenting the work of others as one’s own,2

by and large obfuscates more than it clarifies. It would be more helpful for studentsand staff alike to do away with the notion of plagiarism altogether because it is tooladen with negative and moral connotations (Briggs, 2003). Following Borg(2002), we are trying to reframe the issues in terms of transgressive andnontransgressive intertextuality, which allows us to focus primarily on textual rela-tions and secondarily on whether such intertextuality transgresses institutionalconventions. When we talk of transgressive intertextuality and institutional regula-tion, furthermore, we are by no means proposing decontextualised rules for theidentification of transgressive intertextuality. As our examples and discussionshow, this is always contextually contingent.

Thus, third, our goal is to identify the web of concerns that underlie momentsof transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Our research suggests thatdecisions about the nature of intertextualities are related to questions of studentdevelopment, writing strategies, authorial selves, common knowledge,interdiscursivity, and interdisciplinarity. We argue, therefore, that transgressiveintertextuality is best understood as one aspect of textual construction deeplyembedded in a wide variety of social, textual, and academic practices. Conse-quently, we would suggest that textual borrowing cannot be adequately dealtwith either in terms only of detection and prevention, or of simply teaching thecorrect citation practices, because it is centrally concerned with questions of lan-guage, identity, education, and knowledge.

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INTERTEXTUALITY AND TEXTUAL OWNERSHIP

Plagiarism has been widely acknowledged as a term that defies simple definitions(Briggs, 2003; Buranen & Roy, 1999; Decoo, 2002, pp. 120–124; Price, 2002, p.89; Whitley & Keith-Spiegel, 2002, pp. 16–18). Some researchers in the field havehighlighted the threat posed by plagiarism to the academic status of universities(e.g., Walker, 1998), whereas others refer to plagiarism as an issue that challengesthe moral foundations on which student–teacher relationships are built (Kolich,1983; Murphy, 1990). Furthermore, some scholars have focused on the impact ofelectronic media on student training and assessment (Dawson, 1997). The preva-lent institutional response (see Price, 2002, pp. 89–102) is generally via warningsand admonitions: “Plagiarism will not be tolerated in this subject. Anyone caughtplagiarising an assessment will automatically fail the entire subject,” (Universityof Technology, Sydney, 1999, p. 5) warns one course document. Such an approach,we argue, ignores or de-emphasises the extenuating circumstances that make stu-dents more vulnerable to acts of plagiarism and less receptive to such prescriptiveguidelines. Yet a substantial section of the literature on plagiarism is conditionedby this ideology of pragmatic determinism that advocates containment as a keystrategy (see Howard, 1995, pp. 788–789; Price, 2002, p. 89).

In the new context of electronic texts, this has become increasingly importantwhen, according to Woodmansee (1994), “the computer is dissolving the bound-aries essential to the survival of our modern fiction of the author as the sole creatorof unique, original works” (p. 25). A lack of authorial presence (Price, 2002, p. 96)appears to be one of the reasons why some students are not interested in acknowl-edging textual borrowings from electronic sources. Above all, it is the effortless-ness with which students can manipulate the electronically available knowledgecapital in their assignments that makes electronic sources attractive to them. As re-searchers (such as Landow, 1999) on hypertext recognise, electronic texts are fastreplacing the book as a common source for seeking information, and hypertexts,with their different configurations of information, such as text and graphic rela-tions, reading processes, and reader, text, and author relations (Kress, 2003), arebreeding grounds for intertextual borrowing. Not only has such intertextual agilityexercised a profound influence on how students construct academic texts, but it hasalso created new ritualistic behaviour patterns among students. Students have thecapacity to manipulate electronic texts in ways that do not comply with standardacademic writing conventions. They also can collaborate with each other and bor-row from their classmates, again using electronic means (e.g., cut-and-paste,floppy disc, CD).

The state of thinking on plagiarism, therefore, is often caught between a cul-ture of textual sampling and a culture of textual policing. A growing body ofwork, however, has started to shed light on the complexities and issues that un-derlie textual borrowing. Research that has focused more closely on student

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writing, motivation, and development has shown that textual borrowing is moreof an issue of academic literacy than academic dishonesty, and is therefore bestviewed primarily as a developmental problem (Angélil-Carter, 2000); indeed,“apparent plagiarism” may be a successful developmental process (Currie,1998). In a similar vein, other work has pointed to the potential advantages ofexploiting positive aspects of textual borrowing (Critical Art Ensemble, 1995;Howard, 1995; Pennycook, 1996; Price, 2002). And markers’ perceptions of anauthorial self—and thus the extent to which a text is seen as original or bor-rowed—have been shown to depend largely on writers’ unequal access to discur-sive resources within a larger sociopolitical context (Starfield, 2002). Thesestudies, then, point to the role of cultural, social, and political forces in influenc-ing the ways in which textual borrowing may be interpreted.

The notion that teachers and students are implicated in relationships of powerthat are sociohistorically and intertextually constructed has been well establishedin the literature on second language education (e.g., Angélil-Carter, 2000;Fairclough, 2000; Pennycook, 2001; Phan Le Ha & Viete, 2002; Starfield, 2002)and has profound implications for the ways in which we discuss the concept oftextual ownership. If all texts are filled with the ideas and words of innumerableothers (Bakhtin, 1986; Barthes, 1977), the quest for genealogy and authorshipbecomes a highly complex and problematic undertaking. Scollon (1994, 1995)locates the notion of textual ownership and unitary authorship within “UtilitarianDiscourse Systems,” arguing that the idea that communicative identity can beunified, autonomous, and original “presupposes an oversimplified model ofcommunication, centrally based in the ideology of the rational, autonomous indi-vidual which has been dominant in Europe since the Enlightenment” (1995, p.1).

In a similar vein, Pennycook (1996) examines the Western ideals of owner-ship and authorship against the backdrop of the Chinese predilection for mem-ory work, suggesting that the mnemonic consumption and representation ofknowledges as a cultural construct collide with the dominant ideologies in theWest of the autonomous author as creator and owner of individually producedtexts. He exposes not only the fallacy of a pristine textual integrity so vigorouslypursued by the dominant writing pedagogy of the West but also the inherent hy-pocrisy of its deterministic attitudes to plagiarism. Looking at the ideological di-mensions associated with authoring and textual ownership in three historicalcontexts—premodern, modern, and postmodern—Pennycook suggests reframingthe discussion around issues concerned with cultural appropriation and emergenttextual dynamics, suggesting that terms such as apparent plagiarism and textualborrowing might be less gratuitously discriminatory than instant accusations ofplagiarism. Also of importance here is Adler-Kassner’s (1998) analysis ofprogressivist and expressivist paradigms of ownership. By contrasting the hu-manistic preoccupations of the former with the more individualistic leanings of

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the latter, she suggests the need for a more inclusive understanding of ownershipin textual construction.

For the purposes of this study, we start with the notion of “text” as a form of sit-uated political practice (Luke, 1997) that acknowledges the “political/discursive(subtextual), social/historical (pretextual), and local/contingent (contextual) waysin which texts and readers produce (intertextual) meanings in relation across texts”(Pennycook, 2001, p. 112). The fact that texts are populated with other texts is cru-cial for our understanding of the concept of intertextuality. We propose to viewintertextuality, however, not as a mere manifestation of texts within a text butrather as multiple strands of knowledges within texts designed to produce desiredmeanings. Intertextuality, viewed from this perspective, plays three major, and of-ten mutually constitutive, roles in student writing: conceptual, complementary,and metalinguistic.

Conceptual intertextuality introduces various concepts within a text by ap-propriating concepts from other texts. Complementary intertextuality comple-ments the theme or themes of a text while reinforcing the writer’s points ofview. This mainly comprises examples, allusions, and generic features (e.g.,composition formats that are crucial for maintaining a sustained argument inany academic text). Linguistic resources (e.g., specific terminologies, stancemarkers) used in a text constitute metalinguistic intertextuality. The interplayof these three modes of intertextuality is then linked not merely to relations inand between texts but also to the broader fields of sociohistorically and politi-cally constituted discourses. Power hierarchies are constructed intertextuallyand can also be intertextually maintained, rejected, contested, and transformed.This is the intertextual world student writers have to work within when forgingtheir assignments.

In the following sections, we shall look at different examples of student writ-ing (supported also by interviews) in an attempt to show several important di-mensions of transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. This data isdrawn from two major research projects: the first focuses on interdisciplinarityin student writing, using writing and interviews with 12 undergraduate and post-graduate students pursuing their studies in business administration and commu-nication at two Sydney universities, as well as lecturer and marker responses tostudent writing. The second research project looks at plagiarism, intertextuality,and pedagogy and includes student assignments and semistructured interviewswith 10 students and 10 staff members based at a university in Melbourne. Re-search participants come from a range of matching disciplinary backgrounds in-cluding economics and commerce, media studies, modern and ancient history,political science, law, and linguistics. For the purposes of this article, we shallfocus particularly on patchwriting, authorial selves, common knowledge, medi-ated discourse, and interdisciplinarity as they relate to transgressive andnontransgressive intertextuality.

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PATCHWRITING AND AUTHORIAL SELVES

Howard (1999) suggests that all writers pass through a series of developmentalstages. Howard terms one of these stages patchwriting, which she describes as“copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammaticalstructures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes” (Howard, 1992, p.233). She proposes that patchwriting should be viewed as positive andnontransgressive because it is an attempt on the part of the writer to engage withthe linguistic and discursive forms of particular disciplinary fields, as opposed towholesale copying of entire paragraphs or texts without modification. Such an in-terpretation of patchwriting, she argues, constructs students not as failed authorsand untrustworthy “Others” but as genuine learner-writers authentically engagingwith disciplinary discourses: it is a way of acknowledging that learning is takingplace (Howard, 1999).

Although Howard’s support of patchwriting as a viable developmental writ-ing strategy has attracted controversy (see Schroeder et al., 1996), her work nev-ertheless effectively brings to the fore important questions about exactly howwriters write. The epistemological and semantic dimensions surrounding author-ship, textual ownership, and intertextuality are clearly very complex and can eas-ily demoralise (or at times incapacitate) the novice student writer, especiallywhen coping with academic interdisciplinarity. Patchwriting, or more extensiveexamples of copying, may be symptomatic of this demoralisation or incapacita-tion, but they may also be symptomatic of the need to use the writing of othersto make it one’s own. As Bakhtin (1981), Barthes (1977), and others have sug-gested, using the words of others is the normal human condition, and imitation,as Vygotsky (Cole, John-Steiner, Scribner, & Souberman, 1978) argues, may bethe sine qua non of the learning process. There has been much debate on howstudents’ multiple identities contribute to the ways in which they engage with ac-ademic discourse communities (e.g., Angélil-Carter, 1997, 2000; Canagarajah,1997; Clark & Ivanic, 1997; Fairclough, 1992; Nelson, 1990; Thesen, 1997).Canagarajah (1997) provides evidence of how ethnically and racially marginal-ised students develop their resistance to new academic conventions into whichthey are being acculturated (pp. 186–187) and suggests that a sustainable meth-odology within similar contexts should be an integral part of the writing peda-gogy. Critiquing certain aspects of resistance theory, Welsh (2001) suggests thatstudents learn through developing resistance and that their “legitimate opposi-tion to subordination” (p. 554) should form an essential part of the process ofgaining new cultural capital.

Clark and Ivani� (1997) discuss three broad socially constructed possibilitiesfor self-hood in writers that impact on their sense of ownership of and engage-ment with the texts they produce. They call the first possibility for self-hood theautobiographical self, which refers to the writer’s life history and sense of roots.

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Second, Clark and Ivani� describe what they term the discoursal self, which isthe way in which writers represent themselves in their writing through the typesof linguistic and discursive forms they adopt. The third category they call self asauthor, which refers to the extent to which a writer establishes a sense of author-ity and authorial presence in a text. The ways in which these different identitiesinterrelate is dynamic and often conflicting (pp. 134–136), and indeed it mightbe useful in light of the earlier discussion to append a notion of the resistant orcritical self to these categories. It is important, then, to locate any understandingof textual ownership in the academy as part of a sociohistorically constructedintertextual framework that is part of student identity negotiation.

Natalie is a third-year undergraduate arts student in her late teens or early twen-ties studying in Melbourne. Her first language is Thai and she has been studyingEnglish for 15 years. She submitted the assignment discussed later in her first yearof university study and was given a “B” grade. On several occasions in her inter-view, Natalie emphasised the importance she placed on developing and using herown ideas for assignments, thus seeming to demonstrate a strong sense of herselfas author. She specifically asked, “Why am I wasting my life … just … summariseother people ideas?” and admitted that, in her first year at the university, she tried toavoid subjects with a research orientation and favoured what she saw as practicalor vocationally oriented subjects such as languages. She was very pleased that shehad avoided reading any books throughout her entire second year at the university.In her interview she commented as follows:

I think academics and students don’t look at the same thing in the same way.The student just think, “I don’t care whether the lecturer think I’m intelligentor not, I just want to get quite good mark. I just want to pass this subject; justgo and look for a job.” But the lecturer think about the academic value ofyour work. Maybe PhD students are interested in the academic values, butnot undergraduate students.

Natalie also took the interview as an opportunity to complain about the expecta-tions placed on her as a student and vented her frustration (resistant self) at the lackof recognition accorded to students compared with academics:

I don’t like … doing … an essay that you have to cite you have to acknowl-edge the source because sometime I think … You actually have your ownidea but another person idea just help you a little bit so why should you …give so much credit to them just because they are … a famous academic andyou’re just a student?

The assignment Natalie submitted for this study was set as part of the assess-ment for the subjects Spanish, politics, and history and required students to focus

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on Spanish politics after the death of Franco in the mid-1970s. Students were re-quired to address the following question: Was Spain’s political transition also aneconomic one? Natalie commented that she knew nothing about Spain when shestarted working on the task and that she completed the assignment in 48 hours. Shedescribed the essay as a “summary of my reading, rather than something with myideas,” thus appearing to have very little sense of herself as author (Clark & Ivani�,1997) of her assignment.

Natalie acknowledged that she used to procrastinate with writing essays duringthe first year because she found the increase in word length to 1,500, comparedwith 600 at school, very difficult to manage. In other words, her previous study ex-periences (part of her autobiographical self), had not adequately prepared her fortertiary level study. She added that she had no time to follow detailed referencingprocedures so she “just put all the book in the bibliography and let the lecturer as-sume himself where it’s from,” thus representing a discoursal self that was neitherwilling to assume full responsibility for the discourse moves she made, nor for theoverall text she constructed. Natalie also claimed that “some phrases [she] actuallycopied directly out of the book [and] could be an example of plagiarism but the lec-turer happened to be too kind or something, so he didn’t say anything.” Whenasked to expand on this, a discussion ensued about what constituted a well copiedcompared with a poorly copied essay. For Natalie, the difference lay in whether theideas blended together “in quite a subtle way,” in contrast to an essay in which “thecopied things [are] scattered around and it doesn’t make sense and you don’t knowwhy they put this bit of information there.”

Natalie’s acknowledgment of copying prompted a comparison of her writingwith her source materials. In some places, there were indeed examples of a blend-ing of Natalie’s ideas and language with those of the Carr and Fusi text (1981) shelisted in her bibliography and to which she referred with an incomplete in-text ref-erence. She wrote the following (the italicised sections indicate a word-for-wordcorrelation with Carr and Fusi):

Up to then [the late 1950s] the Spanish economy was predominantly agricul-tural with industrial appendages concentrated in the Basque provinces andCatalonia. It was an autarchy, a self-sufficient, self-capitalising economyprotected from outside competition by tariffs. Administrative controls werecreated and regulated by state intervention. The Institute of Industry (INI), astate holding company, was set up to direct the establishment of basic indus-tries and supplement investment. Prices and wages were controlled; foreigntrade and exchanged rates were closely regulated.

As Carr and Fusi argue, …

The Carr and Fusi version (1981, pp. 49–78) is as follows (the italicised sectionsare worded the same as in Natalie’s text):

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In 1939 Spain was different; it was an agricultural economy with industrial ap-pendages concentrated in the Basque provinces and Catalonia. (p. 49, paragraph1)

The two key concepts were autarky and interventionism. A self-sufficient, self-capi-talising economy protected from outside competition by tariffs and administrativecontrols would be created and regulated by state intervention. (p. 50, paragraph 2)

Prices and wages were controlled; foreign trade and exchange rates were closelyregulated; the National Wheat Service fixed the production of wheat and marketed it;the Institute of Industry (INI), a state holding company, based on an Italian model andrun by an admiral and intimate of the Caudillo, was to direct the establishment of ba-sic industries and supplement private investment. (p. 50, final paragraph, through top. 51, first paragraph)

The most obvious point to make about Natalie’s writing is that it would seem toexemplify some of the characteristics described by Howard (1992) as“patchwriting,” rather than a deliberate attempt to claim unwarranted textual own-ership. The latter is clearly not the case because Natalie makes an in-text referenceto her source material, although this is ambivalent (it could be forward or backwardreferencing to points made) and imprecise (no year or page numbers are provided):“As Carr and Fusi argue …”

Natalie has certainly copied certain phrases verbatim from Carr and Fusi (1981)with no clear attribution; however, she has not copied whole paragraphs or pages ina random or incoherent fashion. By rearranging the grammar, changing the orderof certain propositions, and copying sentence fragments from across three pages ofher source text, she has written a cohesive text that she has blended together to pro-duce part of a paragraph of “her own” writing.

Another feature of Natalie’s text is that it is grammatically accurate except inthe penultimate line, where she uses the past participle form of the verb “ex-change” (as in “exchanged rates”) rather than the grammatically accurate nounphrase “exchange rates.” As has already been pointed out in the literature, gram-matical accuracy in second language learners’ writing is often assumed to indicatethat copying (or “borrowing”) has occurred (see Pennycook, 1996). However, be-cause there is a high level of grammatical accuracy across Natalie’s writing as awhole, this inaccuracy looks, at first glance, more like a spelling or typographicalerror. It may also, of course, be a result of inaccurate but grammatically based re-structuring (either consciously or unconsciously she has added what seems like amore correct “d”).

There are a number of questions that arise with respect to Natalie’s text. Issuch patchwriting acceptable academic writing practice for a first-year under-graduate student? On what basis should we make such a judgement? Con-

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sidering the grade allocated to the assignment, the original marker judged the es-say to be acceptable. According to the staff member with whom Natalie’swriting was discussed, the Carr and Fusi (1981) text is very well known andwould likely have been familiar to the marker, suggesting that he would, there-fore, have been aware of the textual similarities. The staff member also statedthat he did not view Natalie’s writing as highly problematic or indicative of de-liberate deception; rather, he saw her text as showing a lack of attribution, thusmore akin to the category of student as learner-writer, as opposed to intellectu-ally dishonest “Other.”

Natalie’s own account of her writing also needs to be considered. For her, theproduction of a comprehensively referenced text would have been too time-con-suming. Her priority was to submit the assignment on time. She also openly talkedof her disdain for academic values and was aware that not only was her referencingincomplete, she had also copied. However, in addition, Natalie admitted that shefound such essays very difficult to write in her first year and acknowledged that sheused to procrastinate. She commented that by her third year, she had begun to findthe writing of research-based essays much easier.

This case, then, raises several important points: First, we can see how studentsmay use “patchwriting” and how this may be part of a strategy not only to get bybut also to develop writing skills. As with the student in Currie’s (1998) study, thispatchwriting, reliant as it was on another text, was nevertheless a passing strategy.Second, we can see that the lecturers concerned were not overly bothered by whatthey saw: They knew more or less that her text echoed a set text but it was seen asunproblematic. And third, Natalie’s preference for taking practical, lan-guage-based subjects to enhance her own employment prospects and her resis-tance to enrolling in research-oriented subjects, which would require her simply toreproduce the works of others for no obvious personal gain, exemplifies the kind ofbehaviour Canagarajah refers to in his discussion of resistance to linguistic imperi-alism in English teaching (1999). According to the participants’perspectives, then,we appear to have here a case of nontransgressive intertextuality. However,Natalie’s resistant stance pushes us further to consider whether we see our job onlyas policing a set of conventions or whether we are prepared to listen to those whofeel these conventions are worth challenging. Resistance is also an issue in the fol-lowing analysis.

COMMON KNOWLEDGE, POPULAR DISCOURSES,AND MEDIATED TEXTS

The notion of common knowledge is vital for our understanding of some of thenebulous and blurred boundaries between acknowledged and unacknowledgedsources and the nature of intertextuality in student writing. In general, it is not

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mandatory to acknowledge sources of information if they fall within the categoryof common knowledge. Common knowledge may be defined as culturally or lo-cally situated knowledge shared by a group of people with common interest.Hence, mutual understanding among a group of social actors for the purpose of so-cial interaction is central (Swales, 1990). Recent developments in cultural and so-cial literacies (Hallam & Street, 2000; Hirsch, 1987; Kalantzis & Cope, 1989) alsohighlight the facilitating role played by common knowledge in enabling individu-als to be functional within demographically defined settings. These definitions,however, fail to capture the complexity surrounding common knowledge in rela-tion to student writing. If common knowledge is locally defined and understood,what is considered common knowledge for one individual may not be the same foranother. “Popular plagiarism” (or everyday nontransgressive intertextuality) is anintegral part of our life. We use the phrase “popular plagiarism” to highlight asense of intertextual intimacy and also to emphasize the role of intertextual bor-rowing as a pervasive social practice. This aspect, in the context of student writingin particular, has not been subject to adequate critical scrutiny. As social actors, weoften use texts from a variety of sources without acknowledgment in communica-tive social interactions, and, as a discursive practice, journalists and politicians doso on a daily basis. The projection of politicised information by governments, forexample, as plausibly authentic texts, is quite legitimate because they, as we dooutside the academy, perform in disinhibited, and at times decontextualised, socialplanes. Furthermore, the iterative use of most popular discourses by journalists andpoliticians polarises authorial claims to such discourses. Consequently, social ac-tors consume such intertextually constructed textual knowledge as commonknowledge. These habits pose a considerable challenge to the student writer withinregulated settings such as the academy. Because it is not easy to unlearn habits, stu-dents may find that they also utilise these familiar resources in a wide range of con-texts, sometimes unwittingly.

Catherine is a student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in communication at a Syd-ney university. A mature student in her late 30s, she had completed a foundationstudies program prior to embarking on her current study program. Originally fromChina, she has been in Australia for 4 years. Mandarin is Catherine’s first language(although she said she is equally fluent in Cantonese), and in her second language,her written skills are superior to oral production. In one of her assignments, shewas required to write a 1,500-word essay using PAIBOC (purpose, audience, in-formation, benefits, objections, context) analytical tools as outlined in Lockyerand Kaczmarek (2001) to critique a Web help site. The assignment was marked outof 30, with 5 marks devoted to referencing. Her essay revealed some controversialissues surrounding the phenomenon of common knowledge, institutional expecta-tions, and (non)transgressive intertextuality. In Catherine’s essay, intertextual inti-macy deriving from a sense of common knowledge was manifest in her referenceto the Copyright Policy Act:

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The logo that reads ANZ is its official logo and is affected by the CopyrightPolicy Act. Its ABN is 11 005 357 522 and has lots of its branches in Austra-lia and New Zealand including in some other major parts of the world.

The source of this instance of complementary intertextuality remains unac-knowledged. The fact that all official logos in registered business enterprises arecopyright protected and patented is deeply anchored in Catherine’s mind: she be-lieves such information does not require citation because it is common knowledge.According to the marker interviewed, the lack of citation was a transgressive act,because he felt she should have supplied more details (e.g., year, country) aboutthe copyright policy act to which she referred.

A similar instance of intertextual intimacy occurs in Catherine’s use of the sixprinciples for which the acronym PAIBOC stands: purpose, audience, information,benefits, objections, context. She maintained that the omission of the reference tothe class textbook was purely unintentional, and that the acronym PAIBOC was sofrequently used in tutorials that it appeared to be something with which she waswell acquainted; for her, it was merely common knowledge occasioned by iterativeuse. This is an instance where intertextual intimacy takes precedence over institu-tionalised conventions. A large part of her assignment was based on the six con-cepts of analysis and so also represented a case of conceptual intertextuality. Mightthis not be considered common knowledge in a microcontext like this? Again, themarker was of the view that PAIBOC principles should be acknowledged becausethey are derived from a prescribed textbook. The question, however, is in whatways the student should be deemed responsible for having unwittingly trans-gressed the boundaries of academic conventions. In her interview, Catherinestrongly argued her innocence:

I: … So, you omitted the reference purposely?

C: It’s in our textbook, we used PAIBOC so many times, and many times inour tutorials. Yes … [X] knows … [X] knows it’s in the textbook.

L. Yea, but you need to give the reference in your assignment. I mean, thetextbook IS a reference.

C: … [X] knows. I wasn’t copying. We all know PAIBOC. I didn’t copy;we are not allowed to copy here. Here, they are very strict and I lose markseasily …

It is worth noticing some of Catherine’s appeals here. The repeated argument thatthe lecturer knows the source points to another level of obscurity in the languagegames of the academy: “If he or she knows the source, and we’ve all discussed it

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many times, why should it be necessary to tell him or her what it is?” Also of inter-est here is the use of two pronominal references: “I” and “We,” to indicate asser-tiveness and commonality, respectively. So, in her remarks, “I wasn’t copying,”and “I didn’t copy,” she asserted her individuality (both authorial and resistantselves), whereas, “We all know PAIBOC” is suggestive of consensual voices relat-ing to a common identity (common knowledge). The use of “here” twice suggestsboth her awareness of the strong plagiarism policy the university is promoting andthe inference that in some institutions plagiarism is not treated as strictly as whereshe studies. Students thus develop contingent strategies on “academic norms.” ForCatherine, the issue was avoiding covert acts of deception, a result, we would ar-gue, of common approaches to patrolling plagiarism. Meanwhile, she developedher own conceptual map of referencing strategies that question the need to refer-ence shared knowledge.

This instance of intertextuality (viewed as transgressive by the lecturer butnontransgressive by Catherine) poses an important question: Who should get thebenefit of the doubt? Catherine was, in fact, trying to defend herself againstsomething she did inadvertently, and in the process, she developed various ideo-logical stances (Evans & Youmans, 2000, pp. 52–61) relating to plagiarism. Theuse of textbooks (in Catherine’s case it was only one textbook) enhancesintertextual intimacy bordering on common knowledge. It is also significant tonote here that at no point during the interview did she use the phrase “commonknowledge;” very often common knowledge is not cognitively realised, and it isnot conceptualised before using in texts. Students just feel the pulse of thisintertextual intimacy, and, as in Catherine’s case, almost inadvertently use suchresources without acknowledgement.

Perhaps the most noticeable act of transgression was committed whenCatherine flouted a basic referencing convention. Instead of providing a refer-ence list on the last page of her assignment, Catherine wrote the following:

All the relevant information required to write this essay was entirely basedon my personal experience, knowledge and imagination. The site referred[to] was the Site index of www.anz.com.

Here Catherine is knowingly pushing the boundaries of transgressiveintertextuality—and risking five of her assignment marks. Her reference to “expe-rience, knowledge and imagination” epitomises “common knowledge” as an inte-gral part of the knowledge capital acquired through exposure to various forms ofsocial practices.

Students exhibiting such intellectually challenging positions (Nelson, 1990) areoften at the mercy of lecturers and markers who consider such moves as serious in-adequacies in students’ use of academic literacy conventions. However, our re-search demonstrates that some lecturers may also appreciate such transgressive

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stances themselves and ultimately deem them nontransgressive. For example,Catherine’s marker made the following comments:

I think you need to refer to the textbook, at least. However, your personalcontribution isn’t underestimated. Some intelligent responses to PAIBOCanalysis. Shows originality and an enquiring mind. Well-done.

These remarks, calibrated to demonstrate an appreciation of the student’s owncontribution and creativeness, seem to highlight the conflict between institutionalexpectations and individual choices, echoing some of the findings of Starfield’s(2002) research about authorial voice. Catherine was awarded a score of 3.5 out of 5for referencing and an overall mark of 22.5 out of 30 for the essay. The marker addedthat prescriptive criteria for referencing should not simply be enacted to deter plagia-rism and suggested that in cases where this does occur, it often appears to impedestudents’ intellectually creative energies, resulting in an academically unproductiveexercise.

So, as the case of Catherine and her marker demonstrated, common knowledgewithin academic contexts can be an intangible domain where individual percep-tions and assumptions have to be taken into consideration. This situation becomeseven more complex when we investigate the ramifications of common knowledgeemanating from various discourses.3 Viewed from this perspective, social realitiesand texts are produced by discourses. Media texts, both print and electronic, aremajor vehicles for propagating knowledges. What we read in newspapers andwatch on television are often political discourses (interpretations of issues of polit-ical interest) that eventually become part of what we know; these popular dis-courses become what we may call “incipient common knowledge.” Very oftensources of such discourses are not readily traceable and remain unacknowledged instudent texts because they are obscured by the dissemination of informationthrough different media channels (information multichannelling), resulting in a“newsification of popular culture” (Schudson, 1995, pp. 179–80).

Darrell, a Russian student research participant, was of the view that discoursesinter alia constituted what he retained from reading newspapers and watching tele-vision. When he referred in an essay to the freedom of the press in Russia, he wasreminded of information from various media channels that he gathered when inRussia:

Recently the successor to the KGB began forcing Internet service providers toinstall surveillance equipment. Security services can now monitor Internetcommunications without a court order. Internet service providers can losetheir licens[c]es for denying security forces access to private Internet traffic.Fears for freedom of information increased when authorities temporarilyblocked one on-line provider. With the fast growth of the Internet in Russia,

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such restrictions threaten the freedom of Russian citizens. This exampleshows that the government still tries to create boundaries for the free press.

Darrell’s references to various activities of the KGB were in fact associatedwith media discourses, the sources of which he cannot specifically identify and lo-cate. Because writing is a “highly contextualized social action related to publicmoments” (Bazerman, 1988, pp. 22–23), student writings, especially in the hu-manities and social sciences, are inundated with resources from such “mediateddiscourses” (Scollon, 1998, p. 6) that are more often than not unacknowledged.The appearance of such discursive voices in Darrell’s writing is what Faircloughhas termed instances of interdiscursivity (1992, p. 10). The evidence Darrell pro-vides here is discursively constructed using the resources of several media dis-courses on the current restrictions imposed on Internet service providers in Russia.Darrell deviated from acceptable referencing conventions and bordered on trans-gression; yet this need not be viewed as academically unproductive.

The interview with Darrell revealed some useful information about his attitudetoward “cheating:”

I: … Why do you think cheating is not good?

D: I don’t cheat, never.

I: Why not?

D: When people cheat, it’s not good for other students. Some get high marksby cheating and it’s really, really a problem for good student …

In this interview, the concept of intellectual property did not surface. Instead,Darrell associated plagiarism with students’ competitiveness. Similarly, bothHong (discussed later) and Catherine referred to several anecdotal evidencesrelating to success stories of students who submitted copied assignments. LikeCatherine, too, Darrell seemed to have a clear sense of where the boundaries oftransgressive intertextuality lie, yet this may not fit the institutional criteria be-cause of the difficulties in dealing with mediated texts and common knowl-edge. What this clearly suggests is that at issue is not so much students’ disin-terest in what is considered transgressive or nontransgressive within aparticular domain but rather their different understandings of what the game isabout. This points, then, to why admonitions or attempts to show correct cita-tion practices may miss their target, since these are operating from quite differ-ent epistemological assumptions from those of the students.

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INTERDISCIPLINARITY ANDDISCIPLINARY IMPERATIVES

Following Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), disciplinary knowledgemay be defined as institutionalised discursive practices: the repertoire of knowl-edge by which a particular discipline is characterised and represented. This rela-tively homogeneous condition of disciplinary formation constitutes what is gener-ally known as disciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity occurs when a particular disciplineintegrates knowledge capital from one or more other disciplines for various rea-sons (Becher, 1994, pp. 56–70; Geertz, 1993, pp. 19–35; Ivanic, 1998, p. 62). Howdoes interdisciplinarity affect student writers? Within interdisciplinary contexts,the limitations of the conventional categorisation of discursive practices in termsof the “language of geography,” the “language of business studies,” or the “lan-guage of history” (Kress, 1993, p. 16), become more evident. This poses a formi-dable challenge to the student writer working within interdisciplinary settings, forhe or she has to contend with the “dialogic integration” of several disciplines si-multaneously. Many of the elements of these integrated disciplines (e.g., CulturalStudies) are alien to student writers.

Hong is an MBA student with a bachelor’s degree in Mandarin. Her assign-ment, entitled “Decisions Generally Fail Where Managers Impose Solutions, Limitthe Search for Alternatives, and Use Power to Implement Their Plans,” was writtenfor the subject Organisation Analysis and Design and discusses key issues relatingto organizational management. To explore management strategies, Hong refers toseveral disciplinary texts in the field and also to relevant articles in the print media.The first part of the essay, where she refers to 13 disciplinary texts, is characterisedby minimal analytical output on her part. Each paragraph is intertextually con-structed using, in most instances, reporting verbs (e.g., “state,” “mention,” “de-fine,” “claim,” “said”) and inappropriately cited direct quotations as paraphrases:

Pfeffer, J. in Shafritz, J. M. (1992) define[s] organizational politics as thoseactivities taken within organizations to acquire, develop, and use power andother resources to obtain one’s preferred outcomes in a situation in whichthere is uncertainty or disensus about choice (p. 3).

Magnusen, K. O. (1977) state[s] that there is a continuum or range of possi-ble leadership behaviour available to a manager … authority and freedomare never without their limitation (p. 3).

Nutt, P. (1999) state[s] that … the success in contrast can be achieved by in-volving people in … practices what they know … accept uncertainty andambiguity, recognize subtleties … (p. 4).

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Although the aim of Hong’s article is “to assess critically the position of man-agers and the power granted,” the enumeration of theories and concepts in suc-cessive paragraphs (pp. 1–4) demonstrates, among other things, the writer’s dif-ficulties in contextualising and critiquing the claims explicated in the prescribedliterature. To Hong, the content of the subject is completely alien, and in the in-terview, it was revealed that the first part of the essay contained chunks of mate-rial deliberately copied from textbooks, because she felt there was no other alter-native. Sometimes she observes citation conventions, and at other times she doesnot. Nevertheless, she seems determined to create an impression of her acquain-tance with the subject.

Hong’s use of “elevated style” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 152) that is generatedthrough intertextual links demonstrates a sense of “discoursal legitimacy,” whichwas, in fact, her intention. This elevated style was epitomised by lexical choicessuch as “continuum … of possible leadership,” “uncertainty or disensus aboutchoice,” “accept uncertainty and ambiguity, recognize subtleties”; all improperlycited, but derived from the texts to which Hong refers. Thus, while deviating fromacceptable citation conventions, her use of elevated style is a strategy that enticesthe reader into believing that the writer possesses at least a nodding acquaintancewith the disciplinary domain she is exploring. As Bourdieu states, “It is throughthe elevated style of a discourse that its status in the hierarchy of discourses and therespect due to its status are invoked” (1991, p. 152).

Quite appropriately, the first part of the essay is based on disciplinary texts, re-flecting Hong’s belief that they are often hierarchised in the order of their signifi-cance as legitimate texts in the academy. Mediated texts, on the other hand, arerarely prescribed in her discipline (hence hierarchically less important than disci-plinary texts) and Hong uses them in the second part of her essay. Her use of disci-plinary texts and employment of elevated style suggests a determined attempt onher part at discursive construction of texts, which has resulted in a verisimilitudeeffect. Intertextuality (transgressive or nontransgressive?) facilitate her here in thesense that she has been successful in establishing what might be called a disciplin-ary façade (she was awarded 24 out of 35 points for her essay).

The second part of Hong’s essay is based on 10 articles, 7 from newspapers and3 from Internet sources. She employs the same strategy as in the first part of her es-say: reporting verbs and unmarked quotations are used in successive paragraphs.Her intimacy with the interdisciplinary discourses relayed in the articles was insuf-ficient to contextualise intertextual relations and relate them to the assignment. Asrevealed in the interview, this was due to several reasons: lack of prior knowledgeowing to her relatively short stay in Australia, inadequate disciplinary knowledge,and poor reading habits. She is deficient in what Giddens refers to as “discursiveconsciousness” (1986, p. 48). Her alienation from disciplinary knowledge is alsopunctuated by the frequent use of impersonalised (K. Hyland, 2002, pp. 351–58)and passivised structures.

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Hong’s essay develops through a series of loosely connected intertextual re-sources that lack cohesiveness. An intertextual frequency analysis (an analysisbased on the frequency of the manifestation of intertextual resources in a text) re-veals not only Hong’s dependency on such resources but also the fact that she con-tributes very little of her own in terms of analysis. This could be construed, in part,as an attempt at integrating interdisciplinary elements into an essay, which necessi-tates the deployment of intertextually manipulated texts encompassing a variety ofdiscourses and disciplines. The point we want to emphasise here is that before stu-dents work with new knowledges, they need to acquire such knowledges, and thatcontainment in the form of restrictions on plagiarism in these contexts may oftenlead to intertextual transgression.

UNDERSTANDING TRANSGRESSIVEINTERTEXTUALITY

The examples of student writing we have provided here raise a number of importantissues.Our researchsuggests that strategies fordealingwithplagiarismthat focusonpolicing rather than understanding, although perhaps economically pragmatic, are apoor reflection on pedagogy and are unlikely to succeed. Warnings and threatslargely miss the point. Couched in abstract phraseology (e.g., academic crime,authorialpresence, intellectualdishonesty, intellectualproperty),muchof the litera-ture on plagiarism available to students has a heavy focus on citation and referencingconventions. Unfortunately, the more pedagogically oriented strategies to be foundin writing manuals and academic skills and language courses also do little more thanscratch the surface of the issues by focusing largely on paraphrasing and referencingskills. We are by no means underestimating the teaching of citation and referencingconventions; we need to know to what extent such mechanical exercises can in facthelp students to work out, relate to, and find some kind of investment in the obscurelanguage games of the academy, but we also need to know how such exercises canhelp students engage with issues of identity, knowledge, and interdisciplinarity.

We have argued for the need to locate any understanding of textual ownershipand plagiarism in academic writing as part of a broader account of institutionalregulation, interdisciplinarity, and the mediation of discourse. Such an approach,we have suggested, can be helpful in increasing our understanding of the difficul-ties students (and staff) experience in effectively engaging with source materialsand incorporating them into their academic writing. By displacing the concept ofplagiarism, we have tried to avoid the automatically condemnatory accusation em-bedded in this term in an attempt to shed light on how forms of intertextuality maybecome transgressive. Whether intertextuality is deemed transgressive ornontransgressive, furthermore, cannot be decided out of context: It is not subject toan exterior set of laws, but rather is related, among other things, to the level and

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background of the students, the nature of the assignment, the attitude of the lec-turer, and the nature of the discipline.

We suggest 10 concerns that need to be taken on board when we try to understandmoments of transgressive intertextuality: intentionality, development, identity, re-sistance, student epistemologies, common knowledge, mediated discourse,interdisciplinarity, variability, and task type. First, intentionality: Did the studentmean to do what he or she did? This is a crucial first question, for although the admo-nitions and warnings in course guides try to get around this by way of an “igno-rance-of-the-law-is-no-defence”argument, theymiss thepoint thatweneed toknowwhether a student knew what he or she was doing. Clearly, if a student knowinglycopies another student’s text, and hands it in as his or her own, we have a case of un-questionable transgressive intertextuality.But,whenastudent takesnotesavidly inalecture and reproduces them later in an exam, unaware that from a lecturer’s point ofview these may not be seen as “his or her own words,” we have a harder case withwhich to deal. Second, student development. Like interlanguage—the concept of adeveloping grammar that may approximate and differ from standard forms, butwhich it is useful to understand in its own terms as part of a developing sys-tem—intertextuality may arise as a form of patchwriting at a particular level of a stu-dent’s developing ability to handle academic discourse. We need to ask whether aparticular formof intertextuality isbest seen in termsof transgressionof institutionalnorms or nontransgression in terms of a developmental stage in the acquisition of ac-ademic discourse.

Third, identity. Writing is, among other things, about the (re)presentation ofself. If student writing is to be more than the regurgitation of academic text (andmany students, quite understandably, see it as little more than this), we need to un-derstand what resources students bring and what resources are made available forautobiographical, discoursal, and authorial selves. Because of the discursive andidentificatory pulls that construct these selves, furthermore, they will rarely besimple accommodatory selves; rather, they are about struggle and negotiation.Thus, fourth, they are often equally tied up with modes of resistance: We want ourstudents to be critical thinkers, to do things for themselves, but only along the nar-row guidelines that we set for acceptable criticality. We are by no means attempt-ing to vindicate or glamourise various transgressive intertextual practices here(such as total intertextual essay copying); rather, we are trying to suggest thatintertextuality within the dynamics of institutional academic regulation needs to beunderstood in its complexity. How to deal with student resistance to the academy,without taking a simplistic view—such as, if you want to be part of it, you have toplay by its rules—is one of the toughest questions we face.

This points to a fifth element with which we need to engage. As with the re-search discussed earlier, we need to understand the student epistemologies (cul-tural, disciplinary, educational, local) that they bring to and construct in theirwriting and dealings with knowledge and discourse in the academy. Part of stu-

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dent knowledge about plagiarism, for example, is a product of current discoursesthat construct it as an intentional crime. Thus, if they avoid such activity, theyavoid the problem. Yet, unless we understand where our students are comingfrom, we will fail to engage them in meaningful discourse. Linked to this is,sixth, the problem of common knowledge: Unlike a version of common knowl-edge that suggests that within a certain society or cultural entity (often, an unde-fined “community”) there are clearly shared forms of knowledge, we have ar-gued here for a more localised and contextualized understanding: Commonalitymay be quite limited. As a result, what we assume to be in need of referencing(or not) may not be widely shared. Any argument, therefore, that we need toteach students about what constitutes common knowledge (see Hirsch, 1987) issurely both impractical and unacceptably hegemonic: Commonality needs to benegotiable. This concern about common knowledge is closely tied to the issues,seventh, of mediated discourse and, eighth, interdisciplinarity: How studentscome to know things, how different forms of knowledge are mediated by variousmedia, how knowledge operates across disciplinary areas, all have major impli-cations for what is seen as citable, and how students cope with interdiscursivetexts.

Ninth, it is also clear that there are a wide range of views and practices in differ-ent faculties and among different staff members. This not only creates obviouspractical difficulties for students but it also raises wider concerns about the suppos-edly shared “academic culture” into which we are socialising our students. Thereappears to be much more variety in this than is often acknowledged. And tenth, weneed to be very aware of how different assignments and different types of tasks im-pact on how students may write. Of particular interest here is group work (seeSpigelman, 2000). Not only does group work raise questions about ownership oftext within an assignment but it also poses more complex dilemmas for how stu-dents attribute ideas and sources. In addition, the impact of the development of asoft techno-culture4 on academic writing requires careful consideration and fur-ther research if our understanding and (re)production of academic literacy prac-tices is to move forward.

Consequently, we would argue that discourses which deal with plagiarism interms only of detection and prevention, or of simply teaching the correct citationpractices, contribute to, rather than alleviate, the problem. Rather than a punitiveapproach to intertextuality, we would advocate a more complex, more time-con-suming, consultative and exploratory process that acknowledges the interlockingelements we discussed earlier. Given that decisions about transgression must be lo-cally contingent, an educational response to intertextuality can surely only be atthis level. The search for better detection software will only continue the cycle ofsampling and containment because it fails to acknowledge that intertextuality andits transgressive or nontransgressive status have to do with questions of language,identity, education, and knowledge.

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ENDNOTES

1We could cite any number of recent articles in the press discussing the growing problem of plagia-rism in universities and elsewhere. Within a few days, while revising this article, for example, articlesappeared in Australian newspapers under the following titles: “Legal Action Threat Over Plagiarism”and “For Some, Copying Is Not a Crime” (The Australian, Higher Education section, July 16, 2003, pp.29, 35); “Students Weave a Web of Plagiarism” (Sydney Morning Herald, July 18, 2003, p. 3); and “Un-original Sins” (Weekend Australian Magazine, July 19, 2003, pp. 14–19). Of course, whether this repre-sents an increase in textual borrowing or in putting plagiarism into discourse remains an open question.

2Or it may describe practices such as submitting assignments bought from the series of Web sites(or “paper mills”) that advertise term papers (e.g., http://www.SchoolSucks.com, http://www.CheatHouse.com, http://www.Cheater.com, and http://www.PhreePapers.com).

3We are using discourse here in the broadly Foucauldian sense (for discussion, see Pennycook,1994). For further discussion of related concepts of discourse, see Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 1990, p. 143;Mills, 1999, pp. 1–7; and van Dijk, 1997, pp. 1–4.

4By “soft techno-culture,” we refer to the integrative behaviour of three identifiable phenomena: so-phisticated software texts, predominantly electronic-based technology, and new sociocultural identitiescreated by such technology.

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