Saturday, December 01, 2007
Advice for Students: How NOT to Plagiarize
lifehack.org: "With final essays and term papers coming due (at least here in the States) I thought I’d take a moment to offer some well-needed advice to this year’s crop of young plagiarizers who are about to fail there classes because of really dumb decisions they’re making as I write this."
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4 comments:
It seems that this article may be more in line with how to plagiarize WELL and not be caught.. Plagiarism is scary these days because of technology. I think it's even more scary now that I'm in college because I'm not sure if the way I was always taught to cite things is correct and/or suitable for what I'm citing. It's crazy because a lot of times mis-citing something, even innocently, can get you in a lot of trouble and really when it comes down to it, it's the same as copying something on purpose and passing it as your own. I wish there was a somewhat easier way to get around the problem than having lots of complicated formatting around how you cite things. It's amazing how a period and quotation marks can really screw you over.
I think most of the things the author mentions are the stuff the student easily fall into. All through my high school, I had to hand all my papers through a website, which reviews and highlights all the lines that are copied off from online sources. So I am trained what to do and what not to do when it comes to writing papers. The plagiarism seems to be the common thread that everyone has been drawn into including theatre producers and the creative teams at the Urinetown!
I have been repeatedly beaten over the head with "don't plagiarize" since middle school, and I don't understand why it has to continue. The way I see it is, if you didn't think it, and it isn't a common-knowledge fact, cite it. People who are going to plagiarize, at this point(perhaps with a few exceptions), are not doing so accidentally. I agree that this article seems to tell you how to plagiarize and get away with it, but at the same time, everything on that list seems like common sense.
1. If you copy from Wikipedia, you are an idiot. People dumber than you create the entries for that website.
2. The rest of this article seems like an outline of how to assess and adapt the material you are going to plagiarize more than what is technically plagiarism. Maybe a better title would be “Advice to Students: How Not to Tip Off Your Teachers That You Are Plagiarizing”
3. Some of those “third-world knowledge workers” are American-educated. They’re probably young adults who majored in English and can’t find a job now, but that is not the point.
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