Operation: Imitation

I'm going to be honest. When I initially began reading Noden's ideas about imitating versus plagiarizing, I was a bit skeptical. I asked myself how I could teach students the difference and even wondered if there was a difference. How do you teach students that it is okay to imitate without being sure that you can make it completely clear that this does not mean that it's acceptable to copy? Noden admits that the task of imitating rather than plagiarizing is a dangerous one. Luckily, I continued reading with an open mind and found that Noden's ideas are fantastic.

Noden writes that when imitating a text, it is useful to model your writing after the writing of others in terms of structure. The way to avoid plagiarism in classrooms is to encourage students to use the structure of another writer while changing the content to original ideas from their own thoughts and experiences. Noden presents several approaches to this task, of which I will only discuss a few. The concept of imitating structure and changing content, as I mentioned before, is actually called the Hamill Approach.

I enjoyed reading most about the Van Gogh Approach. In this approach, students are taught to use writer's voices in their writing. I think that this approach could be used in many different ways in teaching in an English classroom. Noden uses the voices of Edgar Allen Poe and a newspaper reporter to tell the story of Humpty Dumpty as examples. This idea could also be used with authors such as Shakespeare. After or during teaching a unit on Shakespeare or after reading one of his plays, students could be taught about voice and tone. As an exercise, students could be instructed to write something in the voice of Shakespeare. To continue the lesson and to help students find their own writer's voice, they could write the same story or essay in their own voice, which ties to another of Noden's strategies, "Search for a Personal Voice."

Noden provides other ideas such as imitating poetic sentences, which I believe could be a great exercise. Additionally, he suggests doing some research about plagiarizers, which I also think could be valuable when practicing these types of imitation lessons.

As always, Anderson is beyond helpful in his book, Mechanically Inclined. I found his outline to be a very helpful tool in lesson planning because he really knows how to cover all of his bases and organize all that needs to be taught in these lessons. The idea of an operator's manual that contains seven sections that summarize and detail how to teach students how to fix their common errors really seems to be a good way to target and solve writing issues. Anderson is also very skilled at teaching teachers how to keep grammar fun by suggesting visual and interactive games such as a "sentence smackdown." I also really love that Anderson focuses on teaching students to find things out for themselves, such as with the search for two-word sentences.