Proper Citation and Avoiding Plagiarism:  What Not to Do

Plagiarism and How to Avoid It:  A Case Study

Most everybody knows the commonplace definition of plagiarism:  taking someone else’s words or ideas as one’s own.  And this seems clear enough on the face of it, sure.  For many, though, applying the definition often proves more complicated:  Which words, and what sorts of ideas?   How’s quoting different from paraphrasing, and does putting something in your own words ever serve to make explicit attribution in footnotes or parentheses unnecessary?  How different do the words have to be in order to count as “your own”?  Are there any words or ideas that can’t be owned for any reason – perhaps because they’re so common or shared in a given discussion?  What defines that line?  And how can anyone really be said to own words or ideas in the first place?  

This discussion is designed to answer those complicated questions in as simple and straightforward a way as possible.  Though academic expectations about citation may seem a little murky and foreign to you – and it’s true that expectations do vary in subtle ways across disciplines – questions about what’s expected when you cite sources in an academic paper really can be answered pretty clearly.  

With that in mind, what follows here is a good example of what you shouldn’t do when you use sources in academic writing.   

A Published Example:  Two Essays on Batman

The sets of passages excerpted in boxes below are taken from two studies of the sexual politics of Batman as depicted in comics, tv, and film.  So that you can understand the larger arguments each writer was trying to make in these passages – and thus what they intended to accomplish with their citations – we will summarize the articles and the histories of their publication here briefly.

“Batman, Deviance, and Camp,” by Andy Medhurst, in the box on the left, was first published in a 1991 collection of Cultural Studies scholarship on Batman.  The Medhurst essay argues that there has always been an underground strain of gay-identified Batman readers who, regardless of the apparent intentions of Batman’s creators, interpret Batman and his relationship with Robin in gay-inflected ways.  Most of the time, Medhurst contends, depictions of Batman over the last fifty years – from the 50’s comics to the 60’s tv show to the 80’s and 90’s Hollywood films – have allowed for this kind of double-reading.  But at more reactionary moments, narrowly “reheterosexualiz[ed]” (370) versions of Batman have been much less willing to accommodate this alternative reading, at times even eliminating the Robin figure altogether in what Medhurst sees as homophobic discomfort and paranoia.  In the pop-art 1960’s, a playfully silly or “campy” Batman (xxx) of ambiguous masculinity (Adam West) was fine; in the Reagan 80’s, only a “portentous Dark Knight” (367) (Michael Keaton) would do.  Medhurst’s essay gained a fairly wide popular readership after its collection in an anthology intended for use in undergraduate courses on popular culture called Signs of Life in the USA (1994), now in its fifth edition.

Freya Johnson’s “Holy Homosexuality, Batman!:  Camp and Corporate Capitalism in Batman Forever,” first published in 1995 in an online journal of cross-disciplinary scholarship and commentary called Bad Subjects, begins by presenting the basic precepts of Medhurst’s argument and then quickly pushes them further, applying them to a new subject:  in the general tug-of-war between depictions of Batman, the 1994 film Batman Forever wants to have it both ways, Johnson says.  The film’s campy style is superficially gay-friendly but really only conceals a fundamental homophobia, she argues, since real campiness in the film is always reserved for its main villain, Jim Carrey’s Riddler:  in the end, that is, the laugh is always on the film’s most clearly gay-identified characters.  This kind of skin-deep doubleness, Johnson suggests, has powerful appeal for Batman Forever’s “homophobic mainstream McAudience” (para 3), and she predicts that the “marketing [of]…safely contained and topically sanitized Camp suitable for mass consumption” (para 10) is likely only to become increasingly common in the future.  (As, indeed, it did for many years!)  Like Medhurst’s essay, Johnson’s was also anthologized in an undergraduate reader featuring studies of popular culture, this one called The World is a Text (2002), now being prepared for a third edition.

It’s worth noting, too, that both essays cite the same book very heavily:  Fredric Wertham’s generally forgotten 1950’s pop-psychological call for censorship in comic books called Seduction of the Innocent, which features Batman as a central example of what Wertham saw as the grave moral dangers of comics. 

The passages we’d like to compare are reprinted side-by-side below for ease of reference.

What Did Johnson Do Wrong?

With respect to citation standards, pretty much everything.  

First, of course, Johnson reproduces pieces of Medhurst’s language – verbatim, word for word – that are far too long and significant to be used without acknowledgement as direct quotation.  She’s quoting without letting us know, using strings of words purposefully chosen by Andy Medhurst as if those strings originated with her.  She needs to both put quotation marks around and provide the proper bibliographic information for words and phrases like “spot-the-homo routine” and “takes feverish notes.”  What’s more, all quoted language must appear exactly as it did in the original, so the latter of these phrases should also be rendered faithfully.  

Reordering the words incidentally, as she has – “feverishly taking notes” (Johnson) from “takes feverish notes” (Medhurst) – doesn’t mean she’s not quoting.  She’s just not quoting properly.  

So What Words Do Sources Own? 

Here’s a good rule of thumb about what language is considered the property of a source in academic writing:  quote everything that’s not an article (a, an, the) or preposition (of, in, around), unless of course it's embedded in a larger phrase you want to quote (like “out of his interpretation of certain visual signs”).  You also don't need to quote very commonly accepted and relatively innocuous words in the discussion (in this case, say, “Batman” or “homophobia”) or the numbers that represent statistical evidence. So don't quote 50% or two-fifths, for example, though of course you should quote any language describing what those numbers represent.  That is, you might write something like: "the study found that 27% of 'voters describing themselves as independents' said that they 'did not trust or regularly read political blogs.'" 

Recognize, too, that words falling into this last category – words that practiced participants in certain discussions will recognize as “common knowledge” or “consensus” terms – may be difficult for someone relatively new to those discussions to identify.  So again, you’re best off erring on the side of caution here:  generally, cite for all the language you think is important enough to include from any original source.

Why Quote and Not Just Use My Own Words?

What language is important enough to quote, then -- that is, to not handle with a paraphrase?  

This is one of those things that varies a bit from discipline to discipline; scientists, for example, generally quote a lot less than those in the humanities, reserving quotation only for what they deem to be especially “apt phrasing” – when they decide that you can’t really reproduce someone’s ideas exactly in different words.  

But Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers offers a pretty sensible description of the reasons an academic writer might choose to reproduce another writer’s exact words:

• When language is especially vivid or expressive

• When exact wording is needed for technical accuracy

• When it is important to let the debaters of an issue explain their positions in their own words

• When the words of an important authority lend weight to an argument

• When language of a source is the topic of your discussion (as in analysis or interpretation).  (Hacker 408)

More Subtle Forms of Plagiarism

There are more subtle ways, too, in which Johnson’s essay violates citation standards at the level of language:  in addition to failing to signal directly quoted language, Johnson also inappropriately reproduces both the basic structure of certain sentences in Medhurst’s essay and the general spirit of his writing on this topic.  It’s fine to paraphrase – to put someone else’s ideas into your own language while acknowledging the source of the ideas – but Johnson’s attempts to shift Medhurst’s language by substituting synonyms are entirely nominal.  She changes the sequence “Never show concern if the other is hurt, live in a shack, only have ugly flowers in small vases, call the butler ‘Chip’ or Joe’ if you have to have one at all, never share a couch, keep your collar buttoned up, keep your jacket on, and never, ever wear a dressing gown” (Medhurst) to “otherwise they’d have a butler named ‘Butch,’ live in cramped quarters littered with beer-cans [sic], wouldn’t show concern for one another’s injuries or be caught dead in a dressing gown and cultivate only (what?) cactuses in small ugly metal pots?” (Johnson).  

But this incidental substitution of replacement words does nothing to make the sentence hers.  This isn’t paraphrasing – and of course, even if it were, Johnson has made no attempt to acknowledge that the ideas came from Medhurst, as the conventions of citation insist she must.  As an observation – and as a rhetorical move, too, as a gesture and attitude toward the topic – this sequence is entirely Medhurst’s.  

But more fundamentally, Johnson also uses Medhurst’s ideas without acknowledging.  Nowhere, of course, does she suggest that anyone’s ever said this about Batman before – her most significant omission.  Academic writers are expected to acknowledge any others they know about who’ve made public arguments similar to their own.   

In addition to (and in some ways more important than) “giving credit,” this guarantees that you’re not just spinning your wheels, saying something you don’t need to because it’s already been said – and shows, too, that you’ve done the reading necessary to recognize that there’s a purpose for your essay, that you’re adding to the existing discussion in some way.  Even ideas like Medhurst’s use of “semiotics” to explain the significance of gay “dress codes” (“nowadays we call them ‘signifiers,’” Johnson says about the conventionalized “clues” of sexual identity) should be acknowledged.

"Common Knowledge"

Unlike most language, however, which as we’ve suggested is usually regarded as the property of given writers, there is a fair amount of knowledge you might get from a given source that you don’t need to cite for.  This is called “common knowledge.”  

Under most circumstances (except, perhaps, in the “hard sciences” like geology and physics), any point of general consensus in a given discussion – anything accepted by and large as established fact – is understood to be “common knowledge” and so to not require (or in fact deserve) a citation.  So you wouldn’t need, for example, to cite Medhurst’s essay if your paper noted that Adam West starred in the 1960s Batman tv series, even if you didn’t know this before you read.  

In fact, you shouldn’t, since this would distract readers and have the effect of making your essay seem more densely responsive to the published ideas of others than it really was.

But the idea that some heterosexual audiences have been paranoid about the sexual identity of Batman (Medhurst’s most general claim) isn’t common knowledge.  And it absolutely requires a citation.

Qtd. In:  Using Somebody Else's Sources

Though it may seem odd at first, we should also consider Medhurst’s use of the Wertham book itself as one of the most important of the ideas Johnson borrows without acknowledging.  

We can assume that Medhurst did some significant digging – some important historical and archival research – to find and think through Wertham’s work.  Though the book was important once, it had been generally discredited and forgotten to all but devoted comic book fans by the time Medhurst cited it in 1991.  

Particularly since almost all of the lines Johnson quotes from Wertham are contained in the Medhurst essay, she should acknowledge his discovery and use of this very provocative and unusual source – in fact citing it as “qtd. in Medhurst.”

Why in the World Did Johnson Do This?

We have no idea – especially since she didn’t really stand to gain anything by failing to properly cite Medhurst’s essay.  Johnson has her own very substantial idea in the essay, one that extends Medhurst’s observations significantly.  In fact, Medhurst only figures into her piece at the very beginning, as a kind of jumping off point.   

In this sense, having cited Medhurst’s work really only stands to make her own stronger.  It’s like saying “Andy Medhurst has made some wonderful observations about Batman, but we can push them even further than he does” – which is a very legitimate, even central move in academic writing.  

Indeed, for centuries, writers have been imagined to “stand on the shoulders” of others writing on the same topic before them:   extending what a source has done is a wonderful way to use it.  In fact, we’d recommend this as a general rhetorical strategy in this situation.  If we were Johnson, that is, we’d rework the opening paragraph or so of her essay in something like the form we have below, citing Medhurst properly and situating her project in the context of his argument:

How Bad is This?

Bad.  We should be clear here that we don’t mean by reproducing these passages to accuse Freya Johnson of conscious theft or fraud.  We haven’t worked closely with her or Medhurst and know nothing about the circumstances surrounding the composition of either piece.  

And of course, for what it’s worth, there are signicantly more egregious examples of failure to cite sources:  Eugene Tobin, for example – the Hamilton College President notorious for using verbatim passages from an Amazon.com review in his 2002 college convocation address!  Johnson was still a graduate student when she wrote this, a sort of apprentice academic, and it appeared in a relatively obscure online journal that at the time mainly published the work of graduate students.  Not unlikely, it started as a sort of think-piece for her, an attempt to develop a voice and perspective, that found a wider circulation than she ever intended. 

Still, the reproduction of strings of words as long and important as those Johnson has taken from Medhurst – along with her quotation of the very same passages Medhurst pulled from a generally long-forgotten book and her absorption of the spirit and structure of Medhurst’s prose – strikes us as unlikely to be inadvertent.  And the fact that Johnson’s Works Cited list includes another article from the collection in which “Batman, Deviance, and Camp” was originally published suggests that she was certainly in a position to know about Medhurst’s work.  

Even if it were somehow the product of colossally bad note-taking (as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, for example, claimed about her own plagiarism scandal in 2002), Johnson’s use of Medhurst would still be very serious:  whether the product of sloppiness or dishonesty, any participant in an academic discussion should know better.

Works Cited

Medhurst, Andy.  “Batman, Deviance, and Camp.”  The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his 

Media.  Ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio.  New York: Routledge, 1991.  Reprinted in Signs of Life in the U.S.A.:  Readings on Popular Culture for Writers.  Edited by Sonia Maasik, Jack Solomon.  Boston:  Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Johnson, Freya.  “Holy Homosexuality, Batman!:  Camp and Corporate Capitalism In Batman Forever.”  Bad Subjects:  Political Education for Everyday Life, Issue 23, 1995.  <http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/23/johnson.html>  Accessed August 15, 2006.  Reprinted in Silverman, Jonathon and Dean Rader, The World is a Text:  Writing, Reading and Thinking about Culture and its Contexts.  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 2002.

Hacker, Diana.  Rules for Writers.  5th Edition.  New York:  Beford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

Howard, Rebecca Moore.  Standing in the Shadow of Giants:  Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators.  Stamford, CT:  Ablex, 1999.

Mallon, Thomas.  Stolen Words:  Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989, 2001.

Wertham, Fredric.  Seduction of the Innocent.  London:  Museum Press, 1955.