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UNFORTUNATELY, PLAGIARISM IS A REALITY in most college classes where some students plagiarize unknowingly and others do so knowingly. This situation requires instructors to decide how to manage the situation. Some may take the easy way out by ignoring the problem, simply pretending that none of their students plagiarize. It is hoped that only a few will take this approach, although it can be tempting when saddled with high-enrollment classes and/or a heavy workload. In contrast, other instructors embrace the problem by putting forth the effort, the time, and the creativity to devise practical solutions. Embracing the problem, in turn, gives way to two major challenges. The first involves a willingness to move past the disappointment and frustration associated with accepting that some plagiarism is very likely occurring in our classes. This is necessary so we can move forward with clear, logical minds unimpeded by emotions. The second challenge involves devising practical approaches to manage the problem by reflecting on our past experiences, applying creativity, and considering methods suggested by others.The remainder of this article focuses on approaches designed to embrace the problem. As you proceed, reflect on whether your current approaches to the problem are punitive or preventative. Next, I explain the main reasons students plagiarize. Then, I present several approaches that are relatively effective in managing plagiarism in an extensive team project in my business communication classes; all link directly to specific reasons for plagiarism. Last, the article presents some additional possibilities for managing plagiarism.

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In his comment, Jones discusses prior findings on the relationship between corporate performance and readability of narrative sections of corporate annual reports. More specifically, Jones focuses on our findings (Subramanian, Insley, & Blackwell, 1993) as reported in The Journal of Business Communication. We reported that, based on a style analysis of 60 corporate annual reports, companies that performed well (in terms of absolute net profits) had narrative sections of their annual reports that were easier to read than those of companies that performed poorly. Our findings, thus, appeared to contradict earlier findings by Courtis (1986) and Jones (1988), neither of whom found a positive correlation between readability and performance. We ascribed possible reasons for the contradictory findings that included the use of different measures of performance and the time frame used in the study.Courtis' (1986) study used four measures of performance (current ratio, leverage, earnings variability, and rate of return on total assets) that we argued were derived measures. These derived measures were different from our absolute measure of &dquo;net profits&dquo; which could have resulted in different findings.We also reported that Jones' (1988) study used &dquo;sales turnover&dquo; as the sole measure of corporate performance which, being different from our measure of net income, could have caused the findings to be different. However, as Jones correctly points out in his comment, his 1988 study also used net profit to sales and return on capital employed as measures of performance in addition to sales turnover. We apologize for this oversight in stating that Jones used sales turnover as the sole measure of performance. However, our contention is that Jones' measures-net profit to sales and return on capital employed are derived measures, while sales turnover is a different absolute measure than net profit-were different from those we used and that this difference could have caused the contradictory findings. In addition, as Jones points out in his comment, his was a longitudinal study (covering the period 1952-1985) of a single firm, while our study was cross-sectional, using a sample of 60 corporations.In addition to measures used and time frame, we feel that another factor that may have caused our results to be different from those of