Using other people's words

A few days ago, I wrote about authority in writing. Since it was a long blog post that you might not have suffered through, I'll reproduce a couple of paragraphs:

There's something that happens as you progress through academia that changes your sense of yourself as a writer. I know I took to heart the lesson my English teachers tried to impress upon me that what was important in academic writing was not my opinion, but a careful analysis of other people's opinions. I can distinctly remember several undergraduate papers where the professor told me to put a lid on my own opinions and just focus on the facts - or "textual evidence" as we call it in literature.

I now understand what they were trying to say - that my opinions had to be supported by the text - but at the time the concept was a bit fuzzy, which meant that I studiously avoided expressing any opinion. I invested a lot in the authority of the texts I was examining. I needed to find the right quote to support the argument that I was making, and I know that a few times, the argument emerged out of what quotes I could find, rather than working the other way round.

Today, I came across a series of essays written in a course where they were discussing open education. Since I've been talking about open source with my writing students this week, I took a closer look.

The students were asked to write essays in which they contributed as little as possible to the assignment. A particularly impressive example produced this essay. In it, the writer uses nothing but other people's words to make an argument. Impressive!

It reminds me of a comment I read one time made by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin's biographer, that Benjamin loved using other people's writing and his ideal was to use nothing but others writing. While the essay above is not as artistically crafted as Benjamin's writing, I think he would've approved.

What I'm wondering is whether this kind of exercise might be useful to my students. If I required them to do the same - perhaps not for an essay but for a journal entry or writing-lab assignment - would they get the point? Or would they (maybe willfully) mis-interpret it as me saying they don't need to generate their own arguments in their papers?

I suspect as an assignment it would backfire, but it's an intriguing possibility nonetheless.