Feeding on a culture-wide fear of uncontrolled, incomprehensible technology run amok, and encouraging a suspicion of, a disdain for, even a hatred of students, these stories do us no good at all. Instead, they encourage us to use automated assessment of writing and to cease assigning out-of-class writing. Such measures will indeed assuage our fear that we are being duped by our students: how can they dupe us if we’re expecting, asking, so very little of them?

I try to keep my expectations high for my students. I try to work with them as they write, helping them expand their thinking and open their minds about the topic they’ve chosen (or that I’ve assigned). How can I do that work if I’m only assigning in-class writing? I recognize–because I experience it myself–that teachers’ workloads are rising exponentially, making it ever harder for us to do what we once considered minimally acceptable quality of teaching. That does not, however, mean that it’s game over for us. Yet the New York Times, and all those other media outlets recycling sensationalistic old stories to fill a page and sell copy, are telling us that precise thing. They are selling despair.

I’m tired of reading these stories. None of them has anything new to add to the old script, except that each one uses a new, local example. In the case of “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name),” the “new, local example” is the testimony of a friend of the writer, someone who claims that plagiarism is “turning him into a cop.” Notice that it’s the plagiarism that’s the agent here; the teacher is the hapless, pitiable victim. And in the case of “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery,” the new, local example is the testing center at the University of Central Florida, which the writer, incredibly, describes as “the frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating.” We are cops, we are locked in battle, we are in a dangerous place known as a frontier.

We can do better than this, my friends. And so can the New York Times.

Instead of focusing on students’ citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the eighteen student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students’ critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.

Do check out this new journal. With the field of writing studies growing at its current rate, the discipline needs new venues for scholarly publication. Here’s one, and I can testify to its rigorous, thorough peer review system. Very promising.