Why-Oh-Why

End-of-semester and final-exam pressure brings out the worst in some of us, the best in others. This semester, I've had quite a bunch of each reaction: the most recent headache is a bitchy student who copied from an online source in her final exam.


What's really amazing [and by "amazing" I mean ballsy and personally insulting] is that the student tweaked the original language in a way that indicated she'd thought through how she was going to fake her way through the exam.


Exam question [actually devised in consultation with students in the review session] was "What's the effect on the reader of the unnamed narrator(s) in Toni Morrison's Jazz?" We'd talked in class about who/what the narrator might be, especially in light of the novel's ending, and about the title as a framework/trope for understanding the novel's structure. So I expected an exam answer related to these topics.


Instead, the student wrote this answer:

The effect of having unnamed narrators creates a larger focus on the other characters. As an individual reads through the novel, they ignore who the narrator is and focuses on the story being told. Having this role, the narrator creates a jazz-like feel to the story. Morrison doesn’t reveal who this narrator is, so the reader doesn’t know whether they are male or female, white or black. All we are given is their view on the story being told.  

Up to this point, the answer is not good for a whole host of reasons, but it's consistent with the student's thin understanding of the novel and of how to think about / articulate ideas about craft. So while I didn't quite understand what she was talking about in the answer above, I really didn't think she was plagiarizing, until I started reading this next information (she'd smashed it all into the same paragraph, by the way -- I'm just separating things out here for clarity):

The interesting concept of Jazz is the reality of there being two narrators instead of one. There is the first narrator, an overt know-it-all who tends to be gossipy, who does not reveal that their knowledge is based strictly on observations until the end when it states, “So I missed it all together… I was so sure it would happen… I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, … while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered” (221). The second narrator who makes no claims to any of her knowledge and structures the character’s conversations and emotions without having any bias against them.  The reason I explain this as Jazz-like is because the novel seems to create a fluent form of improvisation through these narrators which is what jazz music is based on.

These ideas are completely, completely new -- no relation whatsoever to topics we discussed in class. And I'm sure you can see a distinct difference in style, syntax, and diction. So I quickly googled "overt gossipy Morrison" and found the following passage in an online article called "Narration and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Jazz":

instead of giving the reader one omniscient narrator, Toni Morrison chooses to use two narrators: One gossipy, overtly hostile voice which presents itself as omniscient; admitting only towards the end of the text to have based all of its’ conclusions on what it can observe (Jazz 220-1); And another narrative voice which often follows closely on the heels of the first, makes no claims to complete knowledge, involves no insults to the characters, yet is involved in framing most of their conversations, thoughts and feelings. . . .To create an omniscient narrator who is both first-person and third-person omniscient is jazz-like because this combination “symbolize an incredible kind of improvisation” (Micucci 275). We can say that Morrison draws upon jazz music as “the structuring principle” for Jazz.

You've probably figured out that the underlining exists to point out the obvious: the "plagiaphrasing" as Brenda Spatt calls it. Startlingly, the copied part is from the very first paragraph of the source article, and the student obviously had to spend some time tweaking the original language to sound like herself, changing "omniscient" to "know-it-all" and "incredible kind of improvisation" to "fluent form of improvisation" (she is a writing major, so she probably likes that slight alliteration).

I guess I will be using this example with future students, as something NOT to do.