Avoiding ‘de-plagiarism’: Exploring the affordances of handwriting in the essay-writing process

This article discusses and challenges the increasing use of plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin and Grammarly by students, arguing that the increasingly online nature of composition is having a profound effect on student composition processes. This dependence on the Internet is leading to a strategy I term ‘de-plagiarism’, in which students copy/paste text into their essays and then ‘cleanse’ the text to avoid plagiarism detection. I...