Friday, October 19, 2012

Plagiarism 10/17/12

What I’ve always known plagiarism to be is when someone copies the work of another person and doesn’t give them credit for it. This could be a simple phrase without citation or a whole paper for a class written by someone else.  In the NPR article, it discussed how Rich Juzwiak, a blogger, brought about the point to NPR that they pretty much stole his idea for a video about cell phones in scary movies. There were a lot of disagreements involved and NPR claimed that it was a coincidental issue that wasn’t meant to happen the way it did. I was surprised at how big the issue was blown up. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal and that the guy should have calmed down a bit. Even more surprisingly, there are 5 types of plagiarism. The first is copy and paste, which is self-explanatory. The second is word switch. Taking a sentence and switching around the words doesn’t make it any less plagiarized, so always gotta’ be careful with that one. The third is style plagiarism. This one is kind of harder to explain, but basically it’s when you write something in the same order as your source but using different sentences in more of your own words. You cannot have the same outline as the original author, which I think is ridiculous, considering some people don’t realize they do that. I mean, why does it matter? If you still cover all the information needed and you formulate your own sentences you should still receive credit. The fourth type is metaphor plagiarism. Pretty much, you need to come up with your own metaphor or you have to cite the one you use. They should just categorize this one with the first type. The last type is idea plagiarism. This one’s confusing to me, but I think it could apply to disagreements about someone stealing someone else’s idea which is pretty common. Just be careful when writing a research paper, or doing a research project guys.


Word Count: 340

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