A Taste of Someone Else's Work

          Have you ever experienced that you have to pass something early and you couldn't think of something else so you rely on the internet and just do copy and paste? Actually, what you are doing right now is called Plagiarism.

Illustrated by Mark Airs/ iStockphoto

          According to the website Free Learn, "Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own. It can include copying and pasting text (like I did right now) from a website into a project you're working on, or taking an idea from a book without including a citation to give credit to the book's author. Plagiarism is common, and the Internet has made it even more common." In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward. Actually, it could be a blog post, an image, a person photo or anything.

         In our lives, it's impossible that you have never plagiarized any someone else's work because even I myself admits that I intentionally copied and plagiarized something before. Actually this happened when I'm about to draw something and I couldn't think of how am  I suppose to conceptualize it so I copied some parts and took it as my own. But in the end, I felt bad and I swear to myself to never do it again because I know what it feels like when someone used your ideas and they didn't even recognized you as the owner of it. It really sucks. Plagiarizing something should not be an option even if you have to pass something really urgent because isn't better to just properly cite the reference or recognize the owner?

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       Actually, according to the website Bowdoin, there are some common types of plagiarism committed by the students. Direct plagiarism is the word-for-word transcription of a section of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks. Next, Self-plagiarism occurs when a student submits his or her own previous work, or mixes parts of previous works, without permission from all professors involved. For example, it would be unacceptable to incorporate part of a term paper you wrote in high school into a paper assigned in a college course. Self-plagiarism also applies to submitting the same piece of work for assignments in different classes without previous permission from both professors. Next, Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original. Sometimes called “patch writing,” this kind of paraphrasing, whether intentional or not, is academically dishonest and punishable – even if you footnote your source. Lastly, Accidental plagiarism occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution.

          Sometimes even if we didn't mean to plagiarize, it's still possible to do it without realizing it. It's important for us to understand that it's still plagiarism, even if it's accidental. So we must learn to cite the reference and recognize every people involved. As one of the blogger said, "Copying content doesn’t mean blogging, it is something like having the taste of someone’s other hard work. If anyone need to copy the content of other post the you should give proper credit to the writer and before that take prior permission of the writer by mailing them. This will add the value to your blog."