This plagiarism experience turned out to be more of a challenge than I had expected. As I mentioned in class, the assignment was rather time consuming, which I found to be ironic. After all, plagiarism is generally perceived to be practiced out of laziness for ingenuity, to cut corners, and to make deadlines seconds before they pass. But this project made me wonder whether I’m wrong. Perhaps stringing different literary works into a cohesive flow really is an art that requires skill and deserves appreciative value. Maintaining a single voice throughout my essay was undoubtedly the hardest part, and I would argue that the ability to pull off such a feat easily should be favorably acknowledged.
Think of all the room there was for creativity. Sure, Scot gave us a specific recipe, but we all created our own signature dish with a different flair of spices (jumbling word order, altering sentence structure, using synonyms, etc.). We weren’t simply reassembling a puzzle straight out of the box; rather, we juxtaposed pieces from a number of puzzle sets so that they would not only fit but also form a new picture of our own. Plagiarism can therefore be an art form, and, in my book at least, deceptive plagiarists (aka those that don’t get caught) have gained a bit more of my respect, though they still trail behind ghostwriters quite a bit.
The key word in that last sentence, however, is “can.” I am still a firm believer that plagiarism should not be tolerated in the university setting. We pay a wealthy sum to exercise an originality of a different kind (that is, unless we are art majors I suppose). We are graded and judged on how well we are able to formulate our own ideas, how well we can create our own puzzle pieces and assemble them for our readers. I stand in support of the idea of having a plagiarism policy, but I still feel that certain changes must be made, which are highlighted here.
3 comments:
I agree with you exactly. At some point though, "good" plagiarists would have to realize that they don't get anything out of the large amount of time they spend to plagiarize well, whereas if they write their own work, they are helping themselves grow as a writer and thinker. I think that if a plagiarist wants to spend all that time and gain nothing, they're the only ones who are going to lose. Therefore, plagiarizing is a lose-lose situation.
I'm glad that we did the ghostwriting before the plagiarizing. I know what you are talking about with plagiarism being thought of as a time saver, and the irony of good plagiarizing taking longer than just writing a paper legitimately. For those who changed the article they plagiarized to sound like them, well I guess that is just time consuming plagiarism. But there were some people in the class that changed their voice to flow with that of their stolen article. That is the part I find more interesting since that might be more like ghostwriting, albeit undesired and unrequested.
Hey Paul -
Well, Friedman only had one phrase that came exactly from the report, so it isn't the worst thing in the world. A lot of times when you have statistics, they are going to be copied to a certain extent...there's only so much fluff you can add between him. If he copied passages or something greater, then it would be different.
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