Post 3: Plagiarism

In the best of my OWN words, plagiarism is the act of using one's text or work as your own. This is also one of the easiest ways to get yourself thrown out of any university. Sure, it may have been cake to get away with copy/pasting bits of information from Wikipedia onto your high school essays but this is the big leagues. With technologies like Turnitin, good luck trying to plagiarize your way out of assignment. Now while there's different degrees of plagiarism, like trying to change around the words versus blatant duplication, none of it is acceptable or even necessary. I've never struggled with avoiding plagiarism, first out of fear, and secondly out of pride for the work I put my name on. Even when writing a research paper or analysis of another work, I try to use as little quotations as possible and clearly cite when I do.

Aside from being shunned among society, plagiarism is also murdering originality and innovation. With the internet nowadays, its far too easy to find an article about what you're looking for and throw it into your own piece. This allows students to write and create without much depth of thought and just mindlessly reword their readings. The best stories and realizations come from heavy consideration of a topic but the creativity of this generation diminishes with every article, video, and picture posted online. Hell, I can't even name how many similar Cinderella movies have been released in just this past decade. It seems a bit dramatic, but plagiarism, besides being against the school's academic integrity policy, is an easy way out from using your noggin and producing any kind of fresh ideas.