Ethical Scholarship for Students

We Want You to Make a Contribution to FYW Classroom Conversations

Ethical Responsibility and Academic Integrity

As members of a community, you’re contributing to our understanding of you, others, and the world, and we rely on you to contribute honestly to our work together. Writing and composition take place in the context of our prior exposure to different experiences, media, authors, and other voices. Anything we write will necessarily engage with those texts. You’ll want to know how and to what extent your peers have used others’ ideas; you’ll want to be able to believe that they have treated others’ work fairly, and that they’ve sourced the works ethically—and legally. As you expect these practices and values of others, your audience will expect them of you, too, because you communicate what kind of writer you are and how you treat others through your work. One of the goals of this course is for us as writers to be able to recognize the issues and audiences we are speaking to, and how that affects the ways we engage or incorporate multiple voices respectfully and responsibly. The ways we do so may change depending on the situation, audience, and/or project. We will discuss the ethics of scholarship and our commitments—intellectual and otherwise—to one another throughout the course. You will also want to be aware of how the University responds to deliberate attempts to falsify, misrepresent, maliciously manipulate, or distort your contributions to the group and work you submit as your own.

In addition to asking you to think through your role as a reader and writer of intellectual matter, we offer very practical advice and specific examples of how to use the words of others in productive and interesting ways. If you have further questions or comments, please let your instructor know, or write to us at firstyearwriting@uconn.edu