“Every Writer is Checked for Plagiarism”: Occluded Authorship in Academic Writing

“Every Writer is Checked for Plagiarism”: Occluded Authorship in Academic Writing This paper takes as its starting point the insights provided by Bhatia (2004), Bhatia / Gotti (2006) and Hyland (2000, 2002, 2005) to investigate the generic features of academic writing in connection with “essay writing services”. These services appear to be playing an ever-expanding role not only in undergraduate but also in postgraduate writing, with serious implications for the quality of higher education and the authenticity of the qualifications awarded by universities. An admixture of far-reaching technological innovation, wide-ranging social changes associated with globalization, and the rapid expansion of higher education appears to have led to the expansion of this phenomenon in academic writing. The paper highlights the discordance between the definition of various forms of plagiarism in academic writing in institutional discourse, and the description of these practices by online “essay writing services” that attempt to present them as legitimate and desirable. An analysis of the generic norms of this occluded discourse community provides evidence that practices once on the margins of the academic world appear to be gaining ground and making increasingly strident claims to legitimacy. In a sociolinguistic perspective, reference is made to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1993 essay on “Defining Deviancy Down” in which he argues that as social pathologies become more common, they tend to be reclassified and no longer seen as a form of deviancy, and this concept may also be applied to academic malpractice. The paper also attempts to cast light on “secondary plagiarism” in which the “essay writing services” that are paid to produce “original work” draw from an existing repertoire of material, thus infringing not only the norms laid down in the official academic discourse, but also the internal “code of conduct” that is part of this occluded genre.