How to address situtations where the effort to avoid plagiarism results in less effective communication?

Question

I have been contemplating this topic because of something that happened a number of years ago. Do you have any suggestions on alternative ways to handle the following case:

A student in one of my community college classes (Introduction to Public Speaking) wrote a moving self-introduction for his “icebreaker” speech. The student was a homeless person who had resolved to become a college graduate and his brief autobiographic speech offered the class a rather poignant insight into what it actually meant to be homeless.

The following year that same student was in another of my COMM classes and the students were required to deliver a persuasive speech based on one of the three classic rhetorical modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos, or logos. The aforementioned student’s speech topic attempted to persuade his classmates to help the homeless by appealing to their emotions. A great deal of his speech was clearly “lifted” verbatim from his icebreaker text. To his credit his speech introduction did include the following sentence: “Last year I wrote a speech describing what it means to be homeless and today I would like to revisit that topic.” and he also correctly cited his own speech in the written outline.

When a student just re-uses all or most of a speech without acknowledging the prior work I consider that self-plagiarism. When a student copies verbatim text but gives clear attribution I consider that a lazy effort. However, in this case the precise phrasing and constructions used by the student had such strong emotional appeal I would be hard-pressed to find any way to revise the speech without lessening its impact.

Imagine having Martin Luther King in your speech class and requiring him to rewrite his "I Have A Dream" speech without using any repetitive phrases.

In this case his grade was based on the 2nd speech alone without factoring in the 1st speech in any way. However I did follow up and educate the student on the subject of self-plagiarism (amazing how few students are aware of this concept) and cautioned him to be avoid or at the least to be extremely careful when re-using his work.

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Considering this particular student's overall performance I am fine with his specific work and the grade he received for this project. However I wonder what I would do if a similar case happened again and felt it would make a good question here. It relates somewhat to the opposite scenario in which a student desperately trying to avoid plagiarism contorts the phrasing of a source into an awkward and ineffective communication.

In the one case the underlying question is: Do you ignore or mitigate the duplication of the (correctly attributed) source to respect the effectiveness of the wording?

In the other case the question is: Do you ignore or mitigate the horrible wording in order to respect the avoidance of duplication?

Answer 1

Let's split this into two different cases:

1. Is re-using a speech self-plagiarism?
2. Is re-using a speech appropriate in that specific classroom context?

Addressing the first question, the reason why self-plagiarism is an issue is that there is an expectation of novelty in scientific communication: re-using text from a previous manuscript is thus "cheating." There is no such expectation of novelty in speeches. It is thus just fine to re-use content in a talk, and there is not even any requirement to acknowledge that one has given the same talk elsewhere. Consider, for example, a person doing faculty interviews and giving the same talk at different places: this is perfectly normal, acceptable, and even desirable. Now, if you give the same talk to the same audience multiple times, they'll probably get bored and stop inviting you to talk, because you don't have anything new to say. Similarly, because talks are often tied to manuscripts, e.g., at conferences, it will necessarily be the case that they contain much new material. Still, these are byproducts of the nature of the communication, not ethical principals.

Now, to the second question: should the student have re-used the same speech in class? Here, I would say that it depends greatly on the educational goal of the class. If the goal is to workshop particular aspects of the content or delivery of a speech, then I think that it would be fine, since you can work on new aspects of a speech even if it is not new (or even yours!): for example, you might want to work on delivery and oration, and even just quoting Martin Luther King could be just fine for that. If, on the other hand, the goal is to learn how to create a speech, then it's failing to satisfy the educational objectives of the class. To take the analogy: even if Martin Luther King's best speech was "I have a dream," it shouldn't mean it's the only speech he can ever give. I wouldn't call it self-plagiarism, since novelty is not the default expectation in speeches, but it would be failing to follow instructions. Not knowing the exact nature and instructions of your class, however, I'm not sure which category it falls into.