Plagiarism is basically the act of using another person's work and passing it of as yours. An example of a very famous book which had been accused of being plagiarized was the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In this case, Adrian Jacobs claimed that the plot for the Goblet of the Fire was taken from his book, "Willy the Wizard". Of course, Jacob failed to win the case and was later faced with a legal cost of a few million dollars. To me, I believe there are two types of plagiarism.
Type 1: The smart one
This type of plagiarism would be where the plagiarizer would copy extracts from the source before tweaking the words by paraphrasing to make it seem as though it was written by himself. He later does not cite the sources totally. This type of people are those that think that they are smart, but actually fails terribly at it. Even though words are changed, Google can easily sought out the best possible results and most of the time, the first result that come out is the plagiarized source.
Type 2: The blind one
This type of plagiarism is where one would copy and paste entirely from the source and just cite it as a reference at the back. Well, I believe this type of people are those that has totally no knowledge of plagiarism, as I admit to have done the same thing when I was in primary school. Of course, I must say that this is the most innocent type of plagiarism, where to plagiarizer does not know what he is doing most of the time.
Overall, I feel that schools should educate their students properly and allow them to understand the true meaning of plagiarism. In addition, teachers should do as much as they can to ensure that the students who plagiarize would not repeat their fatal mistakes again.
I think that for your second type of people who plagiarize, the blind one, are not necessarily the most "innocent" ones. There are people who KNOW what they are doing, yet they choose to do it. It is perfectly possible that they are simply pretending to not know what they are doing. It can also be simply because they are lazy to do their own work to the extent that they do not even bother to try and paraphrase things to make it look like their own work.
ReplyDeleteThere is also one type, whereby he or she copies from several sources while editing bits too. That is the hardest to spot one, and thus I also believe that plagiarism should be avoided, and eliminated through education. However, have you wondered what would happen if a person typed out the whole text himself but the text was coincidentally similar to the other texts?
ReplyDelete@Calvin, that is highly unlikely to begin with.
ReplyDeleteI think there is a very fine line between copying the text and paraphrasing it, and getting information from the text, processing it and coming up with your own product.
For instance, if you were to write an essay (like my blog post on the Xinhai Revolution), you would need to do a bit of research, find about facts, and so on and so forth. In my case, since the post was mainly about historical information, I had to note down certain facts (like what Sun Yat-Sen did, names of characters, etc.) but they were not completely plagarized, because I added my own descriptions to the work.
I feel that it is pretty hard to define plagiarising. What if you were to be finding an answer to a question and, Bam!, there goes you find everything that you need in there. How would you try to get the information without plagiarising then? Does switching words (but essentially the meaning is still the same) count as plagiarising? I guess it means that you have to add in your own opinion as well for it to count as not being a plagiarised work. For example, for many of my blog posts, I actually get the idea and the story from the Monday's newspaper article, IN. However, I add my own reflections and opinions to the issue.
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed very hard to stop plagiarism and is hard to spot if a student makes that little effort to paraphrase the work he copies. However, that does not mean one should be plagiarizing. Whether plagiarizing can be stopped all depends on everyone moral conscience. If one can defy his own moral conscience and plagiarize, there is nothing others can do to help him except to advise him.
ReplyDeleteI think that plagarism is a very evident problem even in secondary schools as students undermine the problem of copy-right issues and the idea of plagarism. While i totally agree with your posts about the two types of people who plagarise, I would like to point out that no matter which time of person you are, plagarism is just not right and hence cannot be accepted. So what if you did not know, it does not make the mistake just as much severe.
ReplyDelete