"Do your OWN work!" Our students have heard this admonition a thousand times, but what does it mean to them, and, more important, what does it mean to us? In the practical world of writing instruction and writing program administration, where students are tempted more and more to "download their workload," freshman composition instructors feel increasing pressure to insure the academic integrity of their courses and their writing programs by "cracking down" on cheating. Similarly, as more students enter college with little of no knowledge of the source use conventions of academic writing, these instructors are also pressured to prevent the unintentional misappropriation of source materials by providing their students with a set of plagiarism-proof guidelines.

Presumably, then, once the student has been told what plagiarism is and warned of its consequences, the situation should be fairly simple. A student’s work must be either her "own," and therefore morally blameless, or someone else’s, and therefore "stolen" (Howard 793).Yet, as the discipline of Composition Studies has matured, definitions of text and authorship have become ever more tentative, ever more subtle and complex.Contemporary writing theorists see the author less as an autonomous creator of independent text, and more as an interlocutor in a cultural conversation, drawing upon many influences to produce an "utterance" that is "filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances" (Bakhtin 91).

In other words, freshman composition cannot be viewed a medieval morality play, where Original is Good and Derivative is Bad. All language learning is derivative. Students must imitate their source materials to some extent if they are ever to acquire fluency in the genre of academic writing. It is the responsibility of the instructor to help them do so without "crossing the line" that leads to plagiarism as it is defined by the university community. As a result, one of the great moral and intellectual challenges of the modern era of writing instruction is to deal with plagiarism in all its complexity, but to deal with it nonetheless.

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