When defining plagiarism, one might
say: an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts
of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's
work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author, or without the
fancy terms, cheating. What do we really do to avoid plagiarism? What is the
real purpose of plagiarism rules? If I were to rewrite the rules of plagiarism
I would make sure to separate the people who aren’t guilty to the actual
cheaters.
In today’s academic world,
plagiarism is something that can ruin someone’s life if you’re not informed of
it properly. Plagiarism is often misconceived as something easy to avoid
because of paraphrasing, but what it really is to writers is a burden. When trying
to inform someone about the facts of a topic, the last thing you want to do is
rearrange the words to make the statement less efficient. But hasn’t it all
been said before? While were busy paraphrasing someone else’s words to make it
our own, how do we know that the same combination of words we are using haven’t
been used before? We don’t. Writing has been around for hundreds of years.
Every combination of all the words in the English language has been used once
before. This takes originality to a whole other level. It questions if
originality can even exists in today’s writing. More people struggle with
trying to watch how they re-word a sentence so there not considered “cheaters”
rather than focusing on how to draw in their audience with facts. There is a
fine line between someone who has their motive set out to copy someone else’s
writing, to put their name on the top of it, versus someone who just wants to
get facts out there.
James Porter draws out the idea of
intertexuality when it comes to plagiarism. He proposes the idea that every
text has a “trace” of other texts. He also touches on the fact that every text
draws some ideas from other texts. So who is given credit for being original?
Darise Bowden describes plagiarism “On
the one hand, plagiarism is a nasty, venal, and immoral crime that needs to be
eradicated while, on the other, plagiarism cannot be a problem--sharing and
borrowing is inherent in the nature of language”, explaining the many sides
plagiarism can be looked at. But can plagiarism be taken so lightly as to not
have a set definition?
Hi Jada,
ReplyDeleteGreat start here. I like how you start out with these definitions of plagiarism and try to complicate them. You also are working towards an your own understanding of how we should view plagiarism: as intentional fraud. I see this happening especially in your sentence: "There is a fine line between someone who has their motive set out to copy someone else’s writing, to put their name on the top of it, versus someone who just wants to get facts out there." So this is good, you're starting to get a sense for how you want to arrange the material you're working with and what kind of claims you want to make. Of course, in the beginning introductory section- you just want to try to show a conversation happening about the topic. You need more sources. We need to get a sense for what other people are saying. Once we know that, we can make more room for your claims. Remember that you can bring in primary sources as part of that conversation too. For instance, you could look at the Ohio University Community standards page, and analyze their definitions of plagiarism. What ideas about this concept is OU pushing? What approaches? Does OU's policy allow for a complex understanding of intertextuality?
Here's the link:
http://www.ohio.edu/communitystandards/academic/students.cfm
Of course, the other thing you'll want to do is find some more research articles from writing studies on the subject. I don't know how much you've looked but the Rebecca Moore Howard bibligoraphies are excellent:
http://www.rebeccamoorehoward.com/bibliographies
Good work so far.