Plagiarism

There are a number of articles about plagiarism on the Internet. Most of them talk about what is plagiarism and provide a clear definition on it. For example, “A Statement on Plagiarism” this article gives an explicit definition: “Using someone else's ideas or phrasing and representing those ideas or phrasing as our own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is a serious offense known as plagiarism.” It helps me to understand the topic swiftly. By the way, this sentence is also a topic sentence for the article. Furthermore, some of those articles also talk about why we should worry about plagiarism and teach us some skills to avoid it. For instance, there are three main steps for avoiding plagiarism from the article “Plagiarism”. First, “Accentuate the positive. Change your attitude about using citations.” It means that showing our own attitudes and thoughts is more important than using citations to prove our points for writing. Second, “Improve your note-taking skills.” It mentions that taking careful notes is simply the best way to avoid plagiarism. And it also mentions that if we improve our note-taking skills, we could also improve the skills about refining critical thinking. Third, “Locate the appropriate style manual.” It talks that there are three matters about citing our sources. In addition, there is a special point from the article “Avoiding Plagiarism”. It mentions that there is another kind of plagiarism, which is called accidental plagiarism. It means that people don’t plagiarism purposely, but fail to cite the sources completely and correctly. And it also gives some tips for avoiding it, such as careful note-taking, a clear understanding of the rules for quoting, paraphrasing and so on. How about the effect for plagiarism? In “Avoiding Plagiarism”, it says that if we do this, we could be punished, suspended, or even expelled. Generally, those articles which I find all give specific definition and methods to avoid plagiarism for writing. So the topic, plagiarism, is not too difficult to understand for me. After reading those articles, I really feel that the own attitude and thoughts are very important. I think that not only for writing but also for all the things which are about creation. I know that it is hard to get the inspiration sometimes when we create something or we don’t know which ways we can use to describe and show what we want to say. So we may plagiarize in those situations. Although we all know that we can’t do the wrong things, we may still do them. However, I think that the all works of literatures or arts have some special meanings which are shown by the works from creators. If we plagiarize others’ ideas, we can’t show our own ones. Even those ideas are similar as ours, they are still not own ones. In a word, be honest for all creations and then the works must be better than copies.
Annie (484)