MLK and Plagiarism

One of my students turned in a paper that should count as plagiarism, but I'm not so sure now. The student produced a sort of patchwork quilt of quotations interspersed with commentary (and no real citation attempts). I got to thinking of Martin Luther King and the way he handled allusions and quotations when he spoke, especially in the well-known "I Have a Dream" speech.

King simply dropped in "This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality" without telling us that it's an allusion to Shakespeare's Richard III. That's OK. Allusions usually work that way.

But when he says, "we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," that's a direct quotation of Amos 5:24. If he were writing a student paper, that would probably be called plagiarism.

I think I need to stress two or three different things here. One is that different forms of literature work differently with quotations. Another is that students don't often know that. A public speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, given in the tradition of Black church preaching isn't really the same thing as a college essay. When I was in graduate school, one of my teachers commented that my writing was in the tradition of the chatty British academic paper—I tend to drop in quotations and assume that people just know where they come from and why they are inserted. My students do the same.

I should remember all that, and work on teaching genres. After all, English 101 is supposed to be about reading as well as writing.