Wednesday, June 30, 2010'♥
With love ♥
After listening to the principal dialogue's section yesterday, I felt an sudden urge to write about the topic of plagiarism as it left a lasting impression on me.
So what exactly is plagiarism,how do we define it?When I checked it up online,I found out that the word itself comes from a Latin word which means "to-kidnap". As it's derivative suggests,plagiarism is "The action or practice of plagiarizing; the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas(literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.) of another." according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online.Basically, stealing the fruits of labour from others IE Copy and pasting your assignemnt.
So,if stealing is considered immoral,why do so many people still plagiarise?I'm sure alot of students do actually,as mentioned yesterday at the Dialogue session,limited time available for our projects is one of the many reasons why they do it,also,they sometimes feel that their own work is not adequate or good enough,so they copy and paste information on the internet which is generally more "better" and more "professional.Why bother to think up your own ideas when you could just google some of the readily available ideas on the internet,isn't that what they are published on the net for?That,my friend,is the thinking that students have when they plagiarise and also the thinking that prevents them from feeling guilt over plagiarising.The dawn of the Information Age and the general affordability of computers and various electronic gadgets have also encouraged plagiarism.Computers even come with functions that allow for quick and easy plagiarism,such as the student favourite,copy and paste and the huge variety of easily attainable content on the Internet,it is difficult to resist the urge to plagiarism,especially when it gives you a better chance to attain better grades,which I believe all students want,me included.
But if we are not supposed to copy information from the Internet,then what is the bibliography section at the end of every research assignment for,decorative purposes?Yes,it's for you to cite sources which you harvested information from,however,it is not meant for sources which you simply copy and paste to your Microsoft Word document and then save,but for sources that you have read thoroughly and comprehend completely,along with what you have derived from painstakingly studying these sources.Yes,it is challenging and extremely time-consuming and all of us have been tempted to or even plagiarise many times but I personally believe it is more worth it to spend 6 boring hours studying all the articles than spending alot more time behind bars when you are caught plagiarising from others.
So,what are some measures we can adopt to avoid plagiarism?Firstly,we could refer to hard-copy sources such as books and magazines for research materials as an alternative instead of information on the Internet.This would put us off from plagiarising material as it would be alot more time-consuming to plagiarise from a ahrd copy source as compared to the plagiarising from the internet.Furthermore,hard copy sources are usually more reliable than those on the Internet as the latter might be written by people who might not have even read about the subject beforehand and the information could have only been up on the web for such a short period of time that it might not even have been reviewed by others for accuracy,whereas hard copy sources would usually have gone through multiple vettings to ensure that the information published is accurate.Secondly,we could train our critical thinking skills more so we would rely minimally on external sources,we would also be able to come up with better or equal ideas ourselves,after all,something original and new is always better.
After everything said,it all comes down to one thing,one's moral integrity,there is always a choice for a person to plagiarise or not to,the question is,what would you do?Ask yourself that....
