Grace Nelson Blog Post 3

Section 4 “What are Assemblages?” was the most difficult section for me to understand, which may be a problem because I feel that it was the most important section of the readings. This section defined assemblages to be “text built primarily and explicitly from existing texts n order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context.” This is a very important definition because it makes clear that when students are using other texts in their work it is not to steal ideas and words, but to build upon and recreate preexisting ideas. Much of this article discusses the preexisting negative outlook on “plagiarism” arguing that if we as a society try to step away from the idea of criminalizing plagiarism and step into a mindset that accepts students using preexisting works to create new and original works, then we can more effectively solve real life problems through communication and writing. The difficult part of this new mindset is deciding when creating a new assemblage becomes stealing. The unethical view of plagiarizing is taking someone else’s works and claiming them as your own. This presents the question of how much has to change form the “original” text in order for it to be considered ethical? In section 4 the example of a webpage was used. This example shared the evolution of webpages through minor changes aiming to make the webpage more users friendly or conventional in most cases. Through these minor changes the first webpage and the last webpage were extremely different, but we can still trace the last webpage to the first. Through the minor changes in reassemble it is unclear to me where change and uses are considered ethical or not.