That's Pretty Close to Plagiarism

Since the student I worked with the first week was away for this week, I was placed with another grade eight student. He is a very frank, and very open boy who likes to speak what is on his mind. Unfortunately, most of what was on his mind was the popular game Minecraft. There was more than a few occasions where the topic of conversation had to be brought back to writing. As I looked through his story, creatively entitled "Short Horror Story," I noticed a few things right away. First, his writing is well crafted and his grammar is near perfect after the first draft. Any errors I caught, he managed to point out before I could. Second, the story had a good flow to it and his use of conventions (capitalization, elipses, etc.) added emphasis in the necessary places. Third, his story was the exact plot to the "Thriller" video from Michael Jackson.

So we had the conversation about plagiarism. I told him that there is nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from another story, but that there is something wrong with copying the exact plot line. It was such an obvious rip off: the protagonist's name was Michael. That is when he admitted that he had forgotten about the assignment, and he wrote it in ten minutes right before meeting me.

So we spoke about the 6+1 traits. the word choice, voice, organization, sentence fluency, and conventions were well executed, and I felt that in the short time we had together, he would be better served talking about the sixth trait, ideas. He admitted to having difficulty coming up with his own ideas. He said he would usually just slightly modify the plot from another story, or borrow ideas from his peers. He knew that wasn't ideal and showed interest in becoming more creative with his ideas. Since his genre of choice is horror, I drew inspiration from some of my favorite horror writers. Often horror writers will start with the ending. Once they know what is going to happen, they work on the details of how the story got there. I showed him some graphic organizers which dealt with developing a sequence working backwards.

Hopefully that strategy might help him with originality in the future!