Name: Juliana Machado Medeiros;

DRE: 116078931;
Date: December 03rd.

ACADEMIC WRITING 1 2016.2

SUMMARY (from 700 to 1000 words)
PENNYCOOK, A. Borrowing others words: Text, ownership, memory and plagiarism. TESOL
Quarterly, 30(2), 1996, p. 201230.
Is this idea mine or not?
In his article about plagiarism called Borrowing others words: Text, ownership,
memory and plagiarism, Alastair Pennycook starts summarizing all the topics he intends to
discuss. To approach an issue like plagiarism, he seems careful on selecting the right words to
talk about it without being considered a plagiarist. According to the author, plagiarism is a
problem when it comes to borrowing other peoples words improperly or when it comes to
develop an idea without mentioning the owner. Pennycook will also show how important it is to
take into consideration not only the persons nation, but his or her everyday context of borrowing
before simply accusing him or her of plagiarism. He interconnects some topics which will be
used as a guide when it comes to understand how did plagiarism become a problem and what had
influenced it. The topics, which will help on developing his ideas, are divided into three bigger
ones: The originality myth: from divine to discourse ventriloquy;, Teachers and changing
textual practices and Textual cultures in conflict.
He introduces his analysis telling about an experience as a teacher at a Chinese
University, called Xiangtan University. Once, after asking their students to make an essay about
a famous person, he found out that one of those looked perfectly written, amazingly organized
and with magically well-chosen words. After a long discussion with his colleagues and with the
student, he realized that he knew by heart what he had written. However, it can be considered as
a case of plagiarism even though the student was not able to assume that the information used in
the essay was internalized in his mind. And this was essential to Pennycook ask himself
questions like: how our discourse written or not can be a plagiarism from anybodys one? At
what point an idea is mine and not plagiarized? Who owns what? Does culture affects the way
people write and read a text? That is what we are going to see through this article.
Pennycoook starts the first topic, The originality myth: from divine to discourse
ventriloquy, pointing how the author is an important key primarily because of the death of
the author which will explain, later, the originality of an idea to understand the origins of
plagiarism and the differences between the concepts of ownership and authorship. As an
example, he mentions Nunan (1988) who sometimes quote himself in his own works and
researches or simply write without using the third person and how this practice enhances
these conceptions. And to illustrate it he mentions Kearneys (1988) genealogy which follows the
order: premodern divine authority , modern forgetfulness of Gods worship and focus on
human imagination as a reproduction act and postmodern individual creativity or authorship.
Moreover, Pennycook also comments that text borrowing discourse borrowing, in this case is
something common since Greek and Roman civilizations. Knowing that Greek people are an old

civilization which lived a long time ago, it is acceptable to say that nowadays discourses and
words are reproductions of their ones. The main difference between modern and postmodern,
according to the article, is that while the first one is related to creativity, the second one is related
to originality and dialogism which can be defined by the dialogue between different texts.
Pennycook explains the issues from every period making a comparison between the past
and the modern visions and approaches. The Modernist Tensions were basically related to
English Renaissance where everything was purely imitated followed by the IndividualistRomanticist view of originality. The Postmodern Uncertainty is not only about the simple
multiple interpretations of a text, but how readers or writers cultural and historical aspects affect
it. This uncertainty was related to the Death of the Author which can be explained by an
unmediated and authentic expression of self (p.209).
The second topic is Teacher and changing textual practices and comments about the
fact that teachers on the one hand accuse their students of lacking originality, while on the
other they defend their cherished creative geniuses against suggestions that they were simply
resaying what had been said before (p.212). Moreover, it also comments about how the
influence of Western Culture developed this idea of originality which created this notion of
plagiarism or, according to Pennycooks quote from Willinsky (1990), This contest of creative
imitation, invention, and authority, which has been at the heart of the force of the book as an
intellectual property, is secured by the concept of an originating author, an actual body that gave
life to words (p. 77) (p. 205). Also, Pennycook mentions that teachers tend to have a difficulty
in separating original ideas from plagiarized ones, once they consider students works
reproductions instead of productions and their own discourses as originals, even though both of
them are based on other peoples words. And they also, in many cases, end up focusing whether
the texts are plagiarisms instead of other possible problems such as coherence, grammatical
errors, etc.
In the third topic, Textual cultures in conflict, and in the fourth, The Everyday
Contexts of Borrowing, the author explains that there are various types of relationships within
texts, memory and learning and that it can vary from culture to culture. In China, like his student
who had written the essay about Abraham Lincoln for example, students tend to memorize things
as a learning technique. Due to this notion of cross-cultural communication (p.218) it is
complicated to simply accuse someone as plagiarist and this is what Pennycook approaches in
the following subtopics Deriding Chinese Learners and Cultures of Memory and Text. And
also, he explains that even paraphrasing is a type of plagiarism not about words, but about
ideas.
Pennycook proposes that teachers should change textual practices trying to be less severe
when he mentions what Scollon (1994) suggests: writing practices are changing, and it is now
common to find multiple layering effects in academic texts, where the supposed origin of a quote
becomes even more murkier. (p.215) mainly if we are talking about a student that is from
China, for example. The author explains that in Chinese culture, people tend to memorize things
easily and for this reason they tend to find difficulties in producing original texts or ideas in
general. Nevertheless, plagiarism or similar attitudes of borrowing peoples words is a crime. But
once taught that it is possible to produce things instead of only reproducing or re-saying by
paraphrasing or using quotations in a cut and paste world, all this struggle in academic world
will gradually disappear. And also, Pennycook says that it is not that important to know who
said what when it comes to an infinite quotation such as the example he gave about Giroux
who had quoted someone who had quoted another person and so on.
Therefore, although the author does not give a concrete solution or way to make that
happen, he concludes suggesting that teachers should change their perspective trying to be less
severe when analyzing texts and answers from their students. This context of owning an idea
may seem complex, but, it is deeply important to enhance the fairness in academic world.

Plagiarism is already a widely present issue in our society even being considered as a
crime and this is important to enhance the necessity of spreading, as much as possible, these
concepts which was discussed not only in this is article but in academic world in general.
Moreover, plagiarism is an interesting topic to be discussed because it is clearly notable how our
discourses depend on what we and our ancestors lived and it means that the big amount of ideas
that we have follows a cycle which constantly remakes and rearrange its own features according
to the period and social and historical context.