PLAGIARISM
PLAGIARISM
Any kind of paper that you submit to a professor should be your own
creation. Of course, you will
obtain most of the dates, names, and ideas from the primary and secondary
sources that you consult. But the
resulting paper should be your own. Think
of it this way: Imagine that you have just listened to a Bonaventure
basketball game on the radio; you have also listened to a postgame radio show
on the game and read articles on the game in the sports pages of the next
morning’s newspapers. Then
imagine that someone asks you about the game.
You will have obtained all your information about it from the radio and
newspapers. But your report on the game will be in your own words, with
your own organization, your own evaluations, your own conclusions.
The same should happen when you write a book critique, a research
paper, or any other kind of assignment for a class.
Plagiarism obviously occurs if a person takes an essay someone else
wrote, retypes it, and puts his/her name at the top. But it’s also plagiarism if a person closely follows the
phrasing and organization of a book or article.
Sometimes a student who wishes to avoid the charge of plagiarism puts a
footnote at the end of virtually every sentence, to indicate that he/she got
most of the words of that sentence from a particular source.
The result might not be plagiarism, but it’s also not a good paper.
The paper must be your own.
The simplest way to avoid plagiarism is to do the work.
Start early on a research assignment, take good notes, and become a
master of the material. Before you start to write, review all your notes.
When you write, you should be able to type paragraphs at a time without
needing to look back through your notes and without consulting your books and
articles. If you cannot write
more than a sentence or two at a time without going back through your research
materials, the result will be that your paper will be one long string of
quotations or paraphrases from other authors, rather than your own creation.
Plagiarism is wrong for several reasons. First, it is the theft of ideas and words from another person. Second, it robs you of training in research, analysis, and writing. If you can’t do your own thinking and writing now, you probably won’t be able to perform well in a professional career. Third, it will make you feel guilty and deprive you of the justifiable pride you can derive from doing a good job. Fourth, you will always be afraid that someone, somewhere eventually will discover your fraud and make it public. There have been famous cases of prominent authors, scientists, and politicians who careers have been ruined when it was revealed that years or even decades earlier they had plagiarized.
Here
is one example. In the late 1970s Arthur Haley's book Roots
became a monumental bestseller and source for one of the most memorable
mini-series in television history. A couple of years after the book
appeared, a man named Harold Courlander read Haley's book and thought that
many of the sentences looked familiar. About ten years earlier
Courlander had written a book entitled The African. Upon
rereading his own book, Courlander discovered that Haley's book paraphrased
literally hundreds of passages from his own book. This passage appears
in Courlander's book: "He must hear what the farmer cannot hear. He must
smell what others cannot smell . . . his eyes must pierce the
darkness." The following appears in Roots: "He must
hear what others cannot, smell what others cannot. He must see through the
darkness." Haley defended himself by saying the hundreds of similar
passages were the result of sloppy notetaking; he claimed that he simply
forgot what were Courlander's phrases and what were his own. However,
rather than face a trial, Haley decided to settle out of court. He ended
up paying Courlander a sizable amount of money.
Here is another example. In 2001 and 2002 several authors of earlier books discovered that famous historian Stephen Ambrose had been plagiarizing their works and earning hundred of thousands of dollars from his bestsellers. In 1989 Joseph Balkoski published a book entitled Beyond The Beachhead. It contained this passage:
The next morning, the 29ers draped the body with the Stars and Stripes and hoisted it on top of a huge pile of stones that once had been a wall of Sainte Croix Church, one block west of the cemetery. The body remained on display throughout July 19. The 29ers and some of the few civilians remaining in the city adorned the site with flowers.
In 1997 Stephen Ambrose published Citizen Soldiers, which contained this passage:
Men from the 3rd Battalion draped the body with the Stars and Stripes and hoisted it on top of a huge pile of stones that had once been a wall in the Saint Croix Church, a block from the cemetery. Howie's body remained on display throughout the next day, July 19. The GIs and some of the few civilians remaining in the town adorned the site with flowers.
Could the two authors have written such similar sentences by coincidence? Yes. But Ambrose's books have many hundreds of pages with sentences and entire paragraphs that paraphrase the writings of other authors. That is more than coincidence, and Ambrose was roundly criticized by historians and journalists for his careless or dishonest work habits.
For
some additional concrete examples of plagiarism and further discussion of the
topic see the following:
The Nuts and
Bolts of College Writing