Think how hard you work to try to phrase things in precisely the right way and you will understand how annoying it is when someone lifts your own original ideas and claims them for their own. However, it is not only annoying for the writer of the original text, it is also dangerous for the person who copies it. If plagiarism is spotted in your writing, your college has the right to fail your essay, or fail you in an exam, and in the most serious cases of cheating in this way, to send you down from the university. It is very easy for markers to spot plagiarism:
- because they know the subject well
- because they have read all the books you're likely to refer to
- because plagiarism will result in a change of style within the essay
The most important thing is always to quote and reference correctly and then you will avoid problems of plagiarism. But if you need to mention someone else's work and you can't find or don't want to provide a quotation, how can you do it? The best approach might be to follow these steps:
- read and understand the original text
- close the book and write out the main points in your own words
- rephrase the main points into your own passage
- compare your writing with the original and make sure that no sentences or long phrases are the same
- don't worry if the quality of the writing is not quite as high as the original….it's much more important that you use your own words.
Remember, if you acknowledge someone else's writing, it will not be plagiarism.
Remember as well, that without trying to put ideas into your own words, you will never develop your own style and never gain in confidence as far as your writing goes. Stitching a few ideas together from someone else's writing does nothing to improve your own writing skills and nothing for your understanding of the subject.
What do you think about these examples? Plagiarism or not?
Sam's essay:
Third, Carl Gardner describes the new 'high-tech' shopping centres how they varied in size and style, spectacularly produced glass atria or glazed barrel-vaults which helps to use the natural light to flood the shops and walkways.
Original:
Though varied in size and style, nearly all centres offer the same basic features. Most importantly, there are spectacularly engineered glass atria or glazed barrel-vaults to flood the shops and walkways with natural light.
(The answer is in the first comment under this article.)
Taken from HERE.
Answer: This could be classified as plagiarism. It is very close to the original. Note the use of phrases from the original: spectacularly produced glass atria or glazed barrel-vaults.
ReplyDeletePlagiarism is something that is unethical and included as a crime, is also something that is keep happening in education life. Student still do this plagiarism although they know that plagiarism is wrong and is a crime. However, I realized that in university, students tend to be more afraid to do plagiarism than high school students does. The punishment university give to plagiarism criminals is more strict than high school. This proves that students will do least plagiarism if the punishment is strict and real. If they do plagiarism all the time and still not being caught, they will continue to do that. Because in the end, student still care about their grades and their education, so if this plagiarism could risk their education future, I am pretty sure they will be deterrent to do that again. And for the case above, in my opinion Sam is doing a plagiarism because he didn’t input citation for his writing.
ReplyDeleteA term that kids older than middle school would know, a term that has been thrown around from one task to another, a term that is so familiar that we’ve encountered examples of them in seminars more than we have actually seen them in person. There never is an orientation day, at any educational institution without that word being thrown around as something that would procure massive punishment. Always trying to tell us that plagiarism is bad, illegal, and it prevents students from exploring their inner creativity and therefore impeding their development as a student and as a human being. Don’t know about human being actually but they tend to be really dramatic about it.
ReplyDeletePlagiarism in most cases are a desperate attempt from people, students most of the time, to hastily finish up on a task that may or may not have been left behind for a bit too long. Some however does not recognize that it could a serious violation of law, if done to an extreme degree.
In my opinion, it is honestly an extremely ridiculous matter to how people can end up resorting to plagiarism. Citation isn’t exactly hard to do and a simply google search can easily help anyone in figuring out a designated format that they require, simply not worth the risk and can cause extremely irreparable damage to any integrity anyone have. But hey, desperate times brings up a lot of chaotic actions.
Plagiarism is clearly a frowned upon act in academic writing. Ever since I entered middle school at the age of about 12, the teachers will repeatedly mention, “never copy and paste another person’s work and use your own words”. I have used this advice in writing several of my tasks, yet I still feel like rephrasing and using my own words is a form of plagiarism. Although most teachers will not recognize it as plagiarism, and anti-plagiarism websites will not detect it, I believe that it is. As seen in the example above, rephrasing will just cover the same main points and will not add anything new to the writing. Rephrasing will require little effort and a writer might as well use paraphraser tools available online. Thus, I suggest teachers to avoid assigning tasks revolving around summaries and straightforward questions, and instead ask for critical analysis coming from their own students.
ReplyDeletePlagiarism is basically taking or copying someone else’s work and claiming it as their own. It has been a serious problem for years in education in Indonesia. It often happens in school, where students copy their friend’s work or from a website entirely without any changes and claiming it as their own. Plagiarism often gets away in high school because teachers didn’t check it entirely or just simply letting it get away. In university, of course, plagiarism is unacceptable. Now, there is an app that could check the originality of our work. There are serious consequences for students who commit plagiarism, so students always try to avoid plagiarism now.
ReplyDeleteThere are some ways to avoid plagiarism. The easiest way is by paraphrasing, which is reading the text and writing it again with our own words, according to what we understand. Never forget to write citation too if we get it from someone else’s work.
Plagiarism is one of the most common problem faced by many people in the world. In my opinion when making a new idea it is important to make your own idea. It is difficult to maintain something you can not produced by yourself. Plagiarism essentially copying the original idea from other people and claiming it as your own. Copying other work will never improve your own skill because the you only copy other idea, essentially all of the idea you copy will be fake in front of the real idea. It become even more dangerous when asked how you create the idea in the first place, it will be very difficult to answer because there are no progress in making the idea, it just copied from other. Not only that plagiarism disrespect the achievement of the original inventor who make the idea in the first place because it take the credit from the inventor.
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting article to read because I'm just attending the soft skills class about anti-plagiarism today. In my opinion, plagiarism is claiming other people work as yours without giving the sources information or without asking their permission first. Plagiarism is a cruel thing to do and very unethical. It is just the same as cheating. Thinking other people giving their effort and time to make something (for example an essay) maybe they even not sleep because of that and the plagiator just copy-paste their work just sounds so cruel for me. We as university students we are expected to submit original work and give credit to other people's works by having academic integrity. Academic-integrity means a practice of being honest with yourself and others by being honest in an exam, doing work with your ideas, or acknowledging all sources of information. Doing all of those things could give students skills that carry them beyond their academic careers.
ReplyDeletePlagiarism is an act of claiming other’s working paper as your own. I think that plagiarism could be considered as a crime, in the form of theft. In this case, people, who plagiarised, steal the composition of another person. Therefore, plagiarism is highly unacceptable. Everyone now should be aware of the risk of plagiarising the works of other people. Most schools have constructed rules regarding this practice of taking somebody else’s work and claiming it as their own. The worst consequence is that the graduated student’s degree might be cancelled or the expulsion of current student. In order to check whether someone copied other works, there has been several software or applications on plagiarism. I believe Universitas Gadjah Mada utilises an application called Turn It In where the system checks student’s papers and detect how many percentages of it is duplicated from a source. To avoid plagiarism, it is recommended for people to paraphrase, which is expressing an idea of others with the use of own words.
ReplyDeleteAbout two weeks ago I got this mandatory lecture about anti-plagiarism and I found it as a very important lesson for us especially college students to be critical and honest in doing our work. The plagiarism itself means of stealing of other people ideas, works, expression, thoughts, and make it ours without giving out citation or credits for that person. By doing plagiarism we are considered doing academic dishonesty and it violates the ethics of journalistic both in academic or non-academic world. It is such a wrongful action in doing plagiarism when it comes doing our work such writing a paper or essay because then you’re not critical enough in doing your work and instead you’re just stealing other people ideas for your own benefits. I think to overcome that problem, we need to practice ourselves by reading more article or news and try to make a summary so that we can have the ability of analytical thinking that will help us in writing essay or paper, when we get used to that we will possibly able to write everything and get creative with words but it is based on true facts not duplicating other people’s work. This will also works in a non-academic based action to avoid plagiarism happen in the future.
ReplyDeleteAs I step into the university environment, plagiarism becomes such an important issue inside the community. To be honest, I wasn’t very aware regarding the consequences and importance of plagiarism during high school period. As far as I know, achieving the highest scores possible using any methods is corrected and normal; however, things began to take a turn even during my orientation period in Universitas Gadjah Mada. Here, everyone makes such a big deal about plagiarism and its consequences, which got me starting to think further regarding this issue. I now understand that plagiarism is a problem since it is basically a form of disrespect towards the creator(s) of a certain work for the amount of effort and hard work they have gathered. But I have yet to experience the negative effects of plagiarism for myself so that I can understand even deeper and appreciate the problem in a much more serious approach. Although, I have promised myself that I will try my best to NEVER commit plagiarism in any level whatsoever and start doing my works by my own efforts no matter what the result. You can take my word for it Mr. Coen, I’m even doing my EWS blog posts all on my own, ignoring the ongoing stories about paying people to do my posts.
ReplyDelete