Writing With Help: What Is and Isn’t OK?
Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University
Abstract: Research shows that university students and professors have different understandings of what counts as “cheating” and what doesn’t. We are told throughout our education to “use our own words,” but does that mean we can’t get any help on our work whatsoever? The answer is, frustratingly, “it depends.” This chapter explores the different sources of academic help and support that may be offered during the course of undergraduate studies, from school-related supports like writing centre consultations and peer tutoring, to private or paid services like language tutoring or proofreading, to the darker side of online companies that offer to “help” students in need but actually do the work for them (for a hefty fee, of course). This chapter offers practical solutions to help students distinguish acceptable collaboration, tutoring, and “writing help” from practices that are more likely to be illicit and counterproductive to both academic integrity and learning in general.
I’ve always loved writing. Over the course of my life, I’ve written stories, poems, academic papers, music reviews, love letters, newspaper feature stories, personal essays, research articles, books, and thousands and thousands of emails. If you asked me who wrote all that stuff, I’d say: “I did.” Me and no one else, usually while sitting in a room alone, just me and a blank page or computer screen. As an academic writing teacher, I try to help my students learn how to shape their ideas in a way that’s acceptable in a university setting, and I expect them to do their own, original work.
But the fact is, if I think a little more about it, I realize that everybody gets help with writing. My mom used to write down my stories before I could even spell, which is probably why I thought of myself as a writer from a young age. My books have editors. My articles are peer reviewed. And if I think a little more, I can remember many times in my life when I’ve witnessed (or participated in) situations like the ones I’ve described below:
Scenario 1: In my second year of high school, I was frustrated with a paper I was writing for my English class. I explained to my mother what I thought I wanted to say, but that I was having trouble putting it into a sentence. “Why don’t you just write that?” she said. “Just say…” and then she repeated my idea back to me – not in my exact words, but in a new, simpler, easier-to-understand way. I wrote down her words – or were they mine? Either way, I felt better about my paper.
Scenario 2: I once travelled to the university where I did my undergraduate degree to give a reading from my first book. I went to see if I could run into one of my favorite professors, but found he was in the middle of a conference with a student. I could just overhear them discussing her paper on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which I vaguely remembered reading and writing about when I was in his class. “Perhaps what this paper is really about,” he said, “is…” and he proceeded to very gently, but convincingly, suggest a new thesis statement for her paper.
Scenario 3: “I don’t know how to start the sentence!” my eight-year-old son whined to me as he attempted to complete another at-home writing assignment now that he was doing most of his schoolwork at home due to COVID. “I know you know how to do this,” I said, trying to be encouraging but probably sounding annoyed. “Why don’t you just start with…” and I gave him the first four or five words of a sentence for his assignment.
These are just a few typical scenarios, of course. We often think of the writer as a “lone genius,” maybe embodying a mythical archetypal figure sitting alone at a typewriter, smoking a cigarette, and sipping whiskey, pounding out the Great American (or Canadian) Novel.
In reality, though, it doesn’t look like that. In fact, almost any literacy activity we take part in is never done in isolation: As the Russian literary critic Mikahil Bakhtin (1986) wrote, none of us is “the first speaker, who disturbs the silence of the universe” (p. 69). In a way, everything we do is a response to input that we get – all our communication, even if it’s just doing a short writing assignment for a class, is “interactive” in this sense.
And in many other ways, the academic work we do in universities is collaborative – group projects, study groups, sharing notes, quizzing each other in preparation for exams.
But most universities also have policies about academic integrity that make it clear you must “do your own work.” My own university has rules that disallow various forms of getting too much help on your academic work, even disallowing things such as “sharing information” and “use of an editor” in some situations – things that I, and almost everyone involved in academia, do all the time!
Your professor puts you into groups, but you have to submit “original work.” Your writing teacher wants you to peer review papers in class, but doesn’t let you pay an editor to proofread your grammar. This can seem contradictory and confusing. What’s going on?
