Blog Post 3: September 17

Plagiarism is something I have known about for as long as I can remember. My father is a university professor and teaches all graduate courses, so I have heard all about the importance of quoting sources since the day I started being required to write papers for school. I have often heard stories of my dad catching students blatantly plagiarizing entire chapters of books or complete articles thinking that he would never catch them. I have also heard countless stories of international students copying works because that is what their culture dictated and they did not want to listen or change what they were doing. Due to my dad ensuring that I have always known these facts, I found much of what was covered in the chapter on "Style Manuals and Citations of Sources" to be fairly straight forward. To me it all seems like common sense, you should always give credit where credit is due. For this reason I try to be extra careful when citing references in any of my work. Unintentional plagiarism is always my biggest fear. When I was working on my undergrad at the University of Northern Colorado, we were required to submit all papers online through a system that would generate a plagiarism report. I don't know the exact program that was used but I imagine it is probably similar to Turnitin. I have friends that were caught plagiarizing via this program and there were always severe punishments. Thanks to my dad, I have also seen what happens when you plagiarize at the graduate level. While my friends may have received failing grades for courses, some of my dad's students have been kicked out of the graduate program entirely. That is definitely not something I want to have happen. This chapter was very good for reviewing what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. With the availability of technology today it can be very easy to plagiarize almost anything. I do like however, that they point out that technology also makes it easier for professors to catch plagiarism in students work. Essentially, it is never worth plagiarizing a source, always cite it. I always take the approach that if it already exists somewhere, then a professor can find it, and they will call you out for plagiarism.

The IC plagiarism guide was also good for reviewing what needs to be cited and how to properly cite these things. All the examples seemed pretty easy to me. The part that I struggle with the most is citing a paraphrase of something. Sometimes it isn't very obvious that I have used another persons work to come up with a way to say something myself. As a result I typically read the original text and then my own work to make sure I have not copied anything. I also always cite something if I am in any doubt at all. I found the animations in the quiz a little comical, and sometimes distracting! Although with the animations it kind of felt like a real life test. I easily get distracted when writing so it was nice to have a couple distractions while trying to identify plagiarism.

I found what Kenneth Goldsmith had to say very interesting, and honestly I'm not really sure what I think of it. Given what I have heard from my dad for so long and what almost everyone in academia has to say, I would completely disagree with him. The fact that he demands his students to abandon all attempt at creativity is almost mind boggling. But he makes some incredibly valid points. It is widely accepted to use sampling today in music, whether pop or classical many composers do it. In hip hop, many artists will use the original recording from a piece of music, splice it into whatever beat they are creating and call it original. This is fairly similar to what Goldsmith is doing with poetry. He is taking parts of poetry from other authors works and splicing them together with everyday things like a traffic report to create a unique piece of poetry. I would have never thought of using a word for word transcription of a traffic report as plagiarism but that totally makes sense. I really like the reference he made to John Cage saying that music is all around us so long as we listen. I would have never thought that a traffic report was poetry but he is able to convincingly present it that way. I suppose that in a way his argument is valid, poetry is all around us, we just need to be able to see it. He states that there are plenty of things that people have published online waiting to be realized as poetry, so why create more? I would counter with saying that it is a great idea to realize the poetry in things that are already created, but we should never strive to cease creativity all together. In my opinion, once we completely deviate from creativity then we will almost entirely lose our personal identities. People will just be regurgitating information in nonsensical ways all of the time. This technique may be good for poetry, but I think it would be a terrible idea for it to translate to academia.

The excerpts from the book served as a good reminder of why we document sources. I do like that it points out that plagiarism is more of a moral and ethical issue than a legal one. Personally I don't ever want to be charged with stealing someone else's work. It was also good to review the proper citation methods for various sources. MLA is what I have been required to use in the past so I already feel fairly comfortable with it.