Imagine this: You’ve just received an assignment for a long paper in class. You’re groaning at the prospect of hours of research and writing maybe a whole weekend gone when suddenly you realize that you had a fairly similar assignment just last semester. If you tweak your old paper a bit rewrite the introduction maybe add a paragraph or two you can be done in an hour. Why not take advantage of your incredible good luck?
Yeah okay there’s an obscure university rule about “self-plagiarism.” But come on you can’t steal from yourself. You have ownership and jurisdiction over your own words and can use them how you like; reusing them would just be taking a shortcut that doesn’t affect anyone else and could even be considered smart economical adaptive. If the paper is good and it technically fulfills the assignment the professor doesn’t have any reason to complain. Right?
Wrong. This line of reasoning is internally consistent but it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of education. The purpose of writing a paper is not to get a good grade not to prove your understanding to the teacher not even really to produce a fine piece of writing. We may appreciate these incidental benefits but if you make them the sole objects of your effort I’m afraid you’ve missed the point. The reason to write a paper is to learn. You have a chance to find new and interesting facts. You may experiment with a fresh rhetorical approach or style of language. The very process of writing may bring out ideas and connections and insight that you had never dreamed of that perhaps no one before you had ever seen. And the whole process even if it produces no practically useful conclusion is strengthening your intellectual muscles — honing your ability to sift the information you need from the chaff form brand-new ideas and opinions out of existing facts structure your thoughts into an edifice that will hold weight turn a witty or elegant phrase and most importantly discipline yourself to a task.
Too often students seem to see school as a series of obstacles they have to just get through. They look for shortcuts and easy ways out trying to make the grade pass the class and secure the diploma with minimum effort. But this mindset can only be sustained by focusing on the day-to-day minutiae of college life. The minute you look off of campus or into the future the moment that you put your paper into proper perspective you see that that attitude is ridiculous. We’re paying to be here. This isn’t high school; we’ve chosen to enroll. In fact you are quite literally paying thousands of dollars for the opportunity to write that paper. If you recycle an old one you have cheated yourself out of that money and that time. You may not have stolen someone else’s work from them but you still have deprived yourself of all the value you might have gotten from the assignment.
Think of it like this. An ordinary person trying to get from point A to point B is entirely justified in taking a shortcut. He doesn’t want to go on a 10-mile jog when he could reach his destination in five minute’s walk and it’s hard to blame him. But if a cross-country runner practicing for a race strolled up to his coach five minutes after he’d been set to run a course having not even broken a sweat and said that by reaching the end point he’d done what he’d been asked to do then the coach’s anger would be justified. The runner’s cleverness in “getting there” so quickly and easily defeated the entire purpose of the exercise the only reason he would try to get there at all.
Accurately or not the university assumes that its students are intellectual athletes seeking to rigorously train our minds that although we might grumble sometimes about the work involved we really do want to be in our peak condition swift and sure-footed and strong. Like any good coach it forces us to do things that are unattractive in the short term in order to help us achieve our own long-term goals. Every assignment is intended to make us deeper thinkers more comprehensive analysts more self-disciplined people equipped to face the challenges of our careers and the needs of the world. If we cheat in any way including re-using our own work we rob ourselves of that opportunity. That is why the university condemns self-plagiarism — not so much as unethical but as ultimately self-defeating.