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Definition: Intellectual property is the term we use to describe what our brains, hands, and creativity have created. As it relates to writing and teaching writing, we are most concerned with making sure that students present us with their own intellectual property because it is a product of the intellectual work we want to see them doing as part of the learning process. In other words, perfect products are not the goal. As part of this conversation, we also must discuss how we deal with others’ intellectual property, including issues like quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, citing, plagiarism, information literacy, critical reading, and generative AI.
Discussion: Intellectual property is an important concept for writers and writing teachers because the processes we encourage and participate in are intellectual work that leads to the creation of intellectual property with value both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers, students, and librarians ALL interact with texts every day in the form of TikTok videos, Instagram stories, gifs, and/or whatever thing is either in or out. Intellectual property does not exist only in academic contexts.
I may be a little biased (check out my 2010 dissertation on copyright law), but intellectual property correlates to literacy work, particularly what we consume and what we create. I best learned to negotiate intellectual property myself as I wrote essays in my early college classes. I couldn’t just say any ol’ thing I wanted to back up an opinion as I had before (I have a distinct memory of writing a teenage feminist essay circa 1999 arguing that short hair on women rejected gender stereotypes). But to be successful in my college classes, I had to read patiently to understand the chapter, essay, poem, or novel, and as I found and read research about that chapter, essay, poem, or novel, I understood it even more thanks to the work of the authors I found through my library database search. And then, I would write these researched essays based on that understanding in a way that nobody ever had before or ever would again because my brain was doing the thinking and my written voice was doing the communicating. What I produced was entirely unique and inherently mine. I was thrilled.
And I still find that thrilling, but when I tell my students how much fun I think research projects are, they look at me like I have grown horns and a tail. Much has been written about students’ struggles in our writing classes: they have trouble with reading, which hinders their ability to interact with sources (The Citation Project; Parrott and Napier); the correlation between motivation and choice (Aitken and Graham); restrictions such as the 5-paragraph essay lead them to believe that research only works one way and starts with the answer rather than a question (Witte); and more. Reading theories such as the transactional model of reading teach us that information doesn’t just go in one direction or another in a straight, uncomplicated line. We bring previous experiences and vocabulary to a text and take away content and questions that then gets all jumbled up with our other prior knowledge and the next thing we read, and so forth. It is an essential part of the recursive, additive, and aggregative processes of learning.
Complications: Intellectual property questions are often presented as right/wrong or good/bad. Go directly to jail; do not pass go; do not collect $200. But, like most binaries we see, that’s not really how things work. Intellectual property issues are often very gray, and that can be difficult for anyone to process, even experienced writing teachers. Instructors can lean in to discussing the grey parts by framing the discussion as an issue of shared values. For example, as a writing teacher, I value
the intellectual work that I know students are putting into their compositions and other creations. This stuff is hard! It takes work to get it done.
helping students recognize that others–whether classmates, their teachers, or published creators–also put hard work into what they do and deserve to be recognized.
choosing to interact with sources in a way that shows respect for the intellectual work. Being careful with quotations, paraphrasing, and citing is just a sign of our respect.
Application: Upper-level high school and undergraduate university students should have a basic understanding of what intellectual property is conceptually, how copyright is the legal part of that, and how those two things affect the values we have in our classrooms.
It would be comparatively easier to drill MLA Style into students’ heads until all our eyes go crossed, but that is not productive. Students should understand why we interact with other peoples’ copyrighted material the way we do, and “because I said so” is NOT a good enough reason.
In classes where students interact with source material (assigned or self-selected), I always explain basic copyright essentials. This builds on something they’re already familiar with because pretty much everyone has heard of copyright, but it adds nuance to their understanding. Very few of my students know about some rights reserved copyright or fair use exceptions. What a lot of them have seen? A YouTube or TikTok video where the poster claims something like “No copyright infringement intended.” Friend. That is not how any of this works!
Here are a few quick ideas for classroom application:
Give students opportunities to play in low stakes ways with their own and others’ intellectual property and come to their own decisions about whether their values line up with ours. Can they articulate both their comprehension of and feelings about the issue?
If they don’t, there are structures in place–such as academic honesty policies–that require adherence nonetheless. Look at your high school, college, or university’s policy on intellectual property. Is there anything about it they would challenge or they find confusing?
Ask them to find copyright statements on documents and interpret what that means for how they are legally, morally, and ethically allowed to use that text.
Explore open educational resources (OERs) and draw attention to their purposes.
Talk about where AI gets its material to generate “new” text. Would it bother them if they know an essay they had written was used by AI to “write” something else for someone else that that person might pass off as their own? Where is the line?
References:
Aitken, Angelique, and Steve Graham. “Perceptions of Choice in Writing of University Students”. Journal of Writing Research, vol. 15, no. 2, May 2023, pp. 225-32, https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2023.15.02.03.
Jamieson, Sandra, Rebecca Moore Howard, et al. The Citation Project: Reframing the Conversation about Plagiarism. Accessed 20 July 2026.
Parrott, Jill, and Trenia Napier. “Critical Reading and Student Self-Selected Texts: Results of a Collaborative, Explicit Curricular Approach.” Journal of College Reading and Learning, vol. 53 no: 4, 316–334. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/10790195.2023.2247462
Witte, Alison C. “Research Starts with Answers.” Bad Ideas About Writing. Eds. Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe. WVU Libraries, 2017.
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