Recently introduced to Google Notebook (by ever-on-the-leading-edge Platypus Matt), I merrily commenced using it to grab stuff off the web for a piece I'm researching. With a plagiarism case from the just completed summer session fresh in my mind, it suddenly hit me that Google Notebook, released in May this year, is cut-and-paste with benefits! Using, it, you mime the actions of patch writers, but with a key difference, because Notebook automatically inserts a source link, even if you're only highlighting and pasting a single paragraph out of a page. Makes you wonder how many students across the country next Fall will be turning in papers put together with its help. Because, after all, it solves a major problem in one fell swoop: Your teacher might fault you for simply stitching paragraphs together, but YOU'VE CITED THEM--and you didn't even have to worry about adding the URLs yourself!

Because of my journalistic background, plagiarism has always been my line in the sand. In eight years teaching composition, I've failed at least half a dozen students--for the course--for word theft. I'm a big believer in talking about real word consequences, per Verity Brown and Mark Howell. And, yes, I know I'm antedulvian: I've read Rebecca Moore Howard, too.

Perhaps as a result, in the last few years, the sand has shifted a bit, and that line's fuzzier, and with the summer session case, I was struck by the fact--as I nailed copied passage after copied passage with Google--that the student had made really smart choices about where to steal from. So, after the customary confrontation in my office, I sat him down next to me at the computer and made him walk me through how he had gone about "writing" his paper, and give me his reasons for having decided which items to steal. He gave intelligent answers that revealed his ability to evaluate sources--he was showing all the discernment one tries to inculcate in students vis-a-vis web sources.

Then I did something new. I started typing in his answers as he gave them, sandwiching a couple quotes with his words, and after a couple, pointed at the screen. "Look," I said, "no way this would be an A paper, but at least you'd acknowledge your sources and begin to incorporate your own thoughts. You already did this thinking on the fly as you snagged the sources: just make it transparent by putting it down on the page." He said he really liked the idea, and I sent him off to rewrite the piece accordingly. As it turned out, he did a lot more in the rewrite than simply sandwich quotes, and in two additional pieces, seemed to be moving in the right direction. No guarantees that under pressure to turn in a paper for another course he won't resort to old habits, but so it goes. At any rate, I didn't fail him.

Oddly enough, I came home that same afternoon and picked up The Exercises of Aeulius Theon (I'm finally getting around to checking out some progymnasmata and highly recommend George A. Kennedy's lively translations) only to read the long prefatory passage in which Theon rats out all the classical rhetoricians who stole whole cloth from one another. "Despite what some say or have thought," sez Theon, "paraphrasis is not without utility."

It will be interesting to see to whether students will find Google Notebook "with utility"--and how instructors will react if they do.