TC-Class: Parasitic Plagiarism and You

     The art of plagiarism is one many students find themselves running into, sucking the life out of their work and creating chaos. It is a tricky subject, plagiarism is, in that the idea of stealing someone's exact words, phrases, and ideas brings up quarrelsome thoughts to some writers: they are just words and expressions. This is where most incoming students get nailed, and they land on the receiving end of a failing grade, perhaps even expulsion.

      But to plagiarize something is actually quite tricky; to take someone's own words and try to pull them off takes some time to perfect, and, realistically, it is a wasted effort in the fact that he or she gets nothing out of it. No, in college, where ideas are to be expressed in an open, mature manner, it is much simpler, and fun, for the writer to create their own masterpiece of communication and spread it about the campus, possibly attached with a well deserved A.

      To refrain from plagiarism, it is best for the student to understand that everything a published writer brings to a work is by ownership his or her own: words, syntax (the way the words are pieced together), ideas (arguments, stories, logical connections, etc.); and if the work is of fiction, the student writer must remember to attach each bit of dialogue and plot structure into attribution, or giving credit back to the original author (“In the short story 'Apology Accepted,' John J. Lewis illustrates...”).

     MLA, or the Modern Language Association, is a swell group that provides structure and orderliness to the act of attributing a work; their handbooks direct student writers to introduce an author at the start, and follow up by mentioning him or her after each quotation or idea in parenthetical citations (along with a nifty page or paragraph number). When asked not to directly quote though, paraphrasing becomes a tricky obstacle.

     Paraphrasing can be difficult, but remember: it is telling the idea in your own words, still giving all credit back to the author. Located on their website, Purdue OWL states, "Paraphrasing is one way to use a text in your own writing without directly quoting source material. Anytime you are taking information from a source that is not your own, you need to specify where you got that information." Paraphrasing and quotations should be used as needed in order to respectfully attribute back to an author, but every original idea regarding a subject must come from the student. Look at it that the author still needs a reason to get payed for his or her work, and while you might not be payed, you are taking that away from him or her.

      As a student, the average college writer is stepping away from high school and onto bigger, better, less dramatic things, but that means giving credit where credit is due just as a professor would give a high passing grade for the work that student has completed on their own.

      Plagiarism is a parasitic pest; once a student begins to commit it, it will continue to grow in that student, and fester, until finally he or she is caught and removed like a tick, marked forever as a thief of logic. That is not to say that writing strong and logical, original ideas is difficult; rather, it is much easier in that the student writer is creating, bringing life into a piece that no one else has seen before. It is rewarding to see the polished work--the writer's own work--return without someone else stealing the vibes. Any college student, experienced or not, can argue the same.


Purdue OWL on Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing can be found here:
                                      http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/563/01/

---Plagiarism:
                                     http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/01/