Brainstorming Sessions

One speaker at the OWCC supported advisors sharing their own ideas when brainstorming with writers. Although I agree that collaboration in the development of ideas can be productive and even entertaining, I was left wondering how appropriate this sharing of ideas is in a writing center session. I know there has to be some dividing line between advising and doing what should be the writer’s work, but where exactly is that division?

In my past experiences coming to the writing center, brainstorming sessions have consisted of the thoughts of the writer (me) and thought-provoking questions from the advisor. I do not remember having an advisor share his or her own ideas with me, and I have always considered that to be a good thing—I was the one writing the paper, so the ideas should be my own. On the other hand, I have heard of other experiences in which the advisor played a more active role in the brainstorming session, offering his or her own ideas to the writer. I understand the argument in defense of this sort of approach: an idea given at such an early stage of the writing process would still become the writer’s own (I suppose) as it is formulated into words. However, I cannot help but wonder if the advisor set the writer off on an entirely different track than he or she would have taken without the session. What if the writer chooses to write about the idea because, if the advisor suggested it, it must be ‘good’? Regardless, the most significant problem to consider is the reason why most professors assign papers to begin with: to exercise students’ abilities to develop complex ideas and convey them coherently in writing. Even though brainstorming presents the illusion of coming before a student starts an assignment because it does not yet involve an actual draft of the paper, the resulting ideas highly influence the formation of the paper itself, and if the ideas did not come from the writer, the paper loses its authenticity. Consider a few definitions of plagiarize/plagiarism:

: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source [Merriam-Webster]

: the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work, as by not crediting the author [Dictionary.com]

: In an instructional setting, plagiarism occurs when a writer deliberately uses someone else’s language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source. [WPA Council]

For the most part, people seem to think plagiarism is only possible if ideas were taken from a published work, but I would argue that deliberately taking someone else’s ideas from a session in the writing center is also inappropriate. Of course, brainstorming sessions present a unique problem because the advisors who share their own ideas are typically more than willing to allow a writer to take them and use them in their paper, eliminating the “theft” aspect of plagiarism, but the lack of authenticity in the final product remains. Professors typically expect to see the original work of the writer, not ideas freely taken from someone else and formed into writing.

In other cultures that are less focused on individuality, such collaborative work in the development of ideas would be easy to support. However, these same cultures are not concerned with extensive citations to avoid what our culture calls plagiarism. I believe it is important for us, as future advisors, to carefully consider our approaches to brainstorming sessions and to decide whether or not an advisor’s ideas belong in them. Perhaps we’ll reach our conclusions as we gain more experience, but I think it would be best for us to approach such sessions with caution until we are sure where we stand.