College Composition and Communication Jun 2005

The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition

Kelly Ritter

Abstract

Using sample student analyses of online paper mill Web sites, student survey responses, and existing scholarship on plagiarism, authorship, and intellectual property, this article examines how the consumerist rhetoric of the online paper mills construes academic writing as a commodity for sale, and why such rhetoric appeals to students in first-year composition, whose cultural disconnect from the academic system of authorship increasingly leads them to patronize these sites.

Journal
College Composition and Communication
Published
2005-06-01
DOI
10.58680/ccc20054824
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
rhetorical criticism first-year composition
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (11)

  1. Gallagher et al. (2025)
    When collaborating turns into dishonesty: A data-driven heuristic comparing hum…
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  2. Pandey et al. (2025)
    Large language models and digital multimodal composition in the first-year comp…
    Computers and Composition
  3. Pflugfelder et al. (2024)
    Surveillance Work in (and) Teaching Technical Writing with AI
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  4. Gallagher et al. (2024)
    Comparing Student and Writing Instructor Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty Whe…
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  5. Gallagher (2024)
    “This Weird Thing I'm Discovering”
    Pedagogy
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  1. Alexander et al. (2015)
    DMAC After Dark: Toward a Theory of Distributed Invention
    Computers and Composition
  2. Bowie et al. (2013)
    De-coding Our Scholarship: The State of Research in Computers and Writing from …
    Computers and Composition
  3. Purdy (2009)
    Anxiety and the Archive: Understanding Plagiarism Detection Services as Digital…
    Computers and Composition
  4. Vie (2008)
    Digital Divide 2.0: “Generation M” and Online Social Networking Sites in the Co…
    Computers and Composition
  5. Howard (2007)
    Understanding “Internet plagiarism”
    Computers and Composition
  6. Ritter (2006)
    Buying In, Selling Short: A Pedagogy against the Rhetoric of Online Paper Mills
    Pedagogy

References (0)

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