Abstract
Motivated by a fear that she may have plagiarized, the author considers the possibility that plagiarism might be understood as a transgression against reading as well as against writing. Drawing on Philip Eubanks’s work in Metaphor and Writing, the article proposes that one reason for composition studies’ ambivalent relationship to reading is that we possess a reading prototype that equates all reading with literature. A significant effect of the prototype is a conceptualization of reading in terms of volume, which understandably transmutes reading desire into reading anxiety. This article suggests that paying attention to the ways in which we find the things we read can help to assuage this anxiety.