Sunday, January 31, 2010

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a word that I have heard of ever since I was young but never really knew the exact meaning until later when I got into high school when I sort of understand what it meant. Through the book "My Word," Susan Blum gave out a lot of samples of how people portray the word plagiarism. I thought it was interesting and how some people like Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized too. So I really want to know what the line is or boundaries for plagiarism are.

In the introduction of the book, I like how Blum describes teenagers as being the wordiest generation ever. "They email, blog, and text message day and night. In some ways this is the wordiest and most writerly generation on a long while." when I was reading this part, I thought it was pretty funny, interesting, and yet true at the same time. It is funny because it is true how we text an email and Twitter a lot, but I never expected us teens today to write more than those of the other generation. Blum also mention how there is so much going in a teen's life that it is hard for us to actually sit down and think about each word we type and say is plagiarizing at all.

It is true that taking other people's work and taking the credit for yourself is wrong.  But citing normally people don't learn it until maybe they hit college. Just like me I didn't know the proper way of citing until I was a freshman in college. Yet I still don't know the "right" way of citing sources. Hopefully the book gives me some idea of citing the right way. It is interesting how Blum did her research, also knowing the fact that many intelligent people have also plagiarize on some way. Chapter 1 gave me a bit more understanding of what plagiarism is and yet in a way confuses me at the same time. Going back to my previous paragraph, I still don't know what is the boundary or line for plagiarism, which part is in the grey area and which part is not. 


Sherry

5 comments:

  1. OMWord! Who's that guy? haha.
    Anyways, just like you, I'd like to know where the line is drawn for plagiarism. Stupid gray area~ I knew of plagiarism sometime in high school, but I remember that bibliographies were important in middle school too.
    I also thought her take on teenagers was interestingly funny. We can be lazy, but busy busy bees as well. ;n

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  2. I, myself, thought it was pretty funny seeing how today's generation is wordier than older generations. We see ourselves glued to popular communications like Facebook and Twitter or even our phones. We can type like crazy when it comes to those type of communications but when it comes to paper work we can't write anything

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  3. I did not fully understand plagiarism until High School as well. Most of my life, I thought plagiarism was just copying and pasting someone's work.

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  4. I agree with how funny it was in the intro when they pointed out this generations constant texting blogging ect. Its interesting how true it is that we tend to constantly be doing some form of writing.

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  5. We can talk about this more in class -- how information technology has affected the ways in which we communicate.

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