How to Prevent Plagiarism in the Search Decade (Esp Your Own)

As someone whose original field is English, I possess a finely-honed abhorrence of plagiarism.  How many banal papers have I read that suddenly, with a paragraph change, soared to Barthesian prose--because, of course, they were stealing from Barthes' prose?   As if no one would notice . . .

Now the shoe is on the other foot and I'm not sure anyone has really dealt with the issue of plagiarism in what has recently been called the Search Decade by Michael Kruse of the St Petersburg Times.  What I refer to is the difficulty of remembering what are your own words and ideas versus someone else's amid the cognitive process of inductive learning known as "search."

As many of you know, I am writing full tilt these days to meet a January 15 trade deadline on my book on the science of attention in the classroom, at work, and everywhere else.   I have written hundreds (many hundreds) of pages and am now in the final throes of shaping the manuscript.  My research needs constant updatingy since this is a very hot area where paradigms are shifting (finally!), and so, as I revise something that was written unconscionably long ago (say, last November, when I sold this book), I make sure to investigate all new research in the area.   I am constantly finding myself wandering down the delightful Alice-like rabbit hole called "Google Search."  I find a topic, I find an experiment, I grow interested in that researcher's work, I follow that for a while.  After twenty or thirty minute of being deliciously waylaid by ideas, I go back to my own text.

Now, here's the fun part.   Of course my ideas have changed at the end of the search since it is my own ideas that powered the search.   In other words, the whole point of Internet interaction and knowledge-making is it is process driven by the searcher.  If I read ten pages and one idea leaps out for me and I follow that idea to yet another paper on that topic, I am the one making that selection from all the material.  And that is how it goes.  Even before I realize I am building evidence toward an argument, I am, simply by the associational process known as "search."

What I will be arguing in this book is that our educational system hasn't even begun to take into account how idea-making is changed by search.  We still grade and assess and measure and test learning disabilities for what I have dubbed "hunt-and-peck method of thinking," not for the progressive, associative, interest-based mode of digital search-based thinking.  If we learned how to change everything, from the bottom up, just took it all down and started over again, thinking about thinking for the digital age instead of (as is the case now) for the Industrial Age, we would be far less inclined toward the ridiculous, binary "pro" versus "con" hyperbolic, oppositional, you-are-an-idiot-and-I'm-not discourse that prevails as debate now.   For, indeed, in search-based associational thinking, one finds lots more commonality than one might think, precisely because association tends to lead us from one thought to another, along the path of the thoughts already arrayed before us, that we Google or Bing our way through.

But now back to the original, practical question?  After my fifteen minutes of searches, where I've saved my favorites in my delicious account and now am back to revising my book manuscript, how do i keep myself from panicking that I may have inadvertently taken a paragraph from someone else?   My trick is to type in a weird typeface.  I do the same for old and new drafts.  It's a bit confusing on the page, but at a glance I can recognize what is my current idea, what is my old idea, and what is someone else's idea and requires careful attribution and footnoting---even if I may have arrived at the same conclusion on my own.   I'd love to hear from others who have come up with their own methods for making sure ideas and facts derived from Google searches remain nicely and neatly attributed to the proper source.   Like Faulkner, one could use different color inks for each thought-thread?   I've been enjoying exploring typefaces, from Abadi to Zapfino.  (Everyone's ideas look more elegant in Zapfino, btw.)

Just because thnking is continuous in the Search Decade, doesn't mean that it should not be attributed.   In fact, as every good English teacher knows, in the era of search, plagiarism is very, very easy to do---but even easier to find!  Which leads me to a final point, since every culture has a different limit on what it defines as "plagiarism," do we think the American English Teacher definition will change in this digital era of continuous, contiguous, search-driven associational thinking?