As human beings I think we're always searching for easier ways to get things done. We're always taking shortcuts to reach our final destination. A perfect example of that is plagiarism, the most common form of cheating. Instead of doing it the good old fashion way with a pen paper and your own thoughts, now completing a ten page paper is just one click away.
After reading the "Adventures in Cheating" article I was amazed at how much trouble some people go through to get the job done. At the end of the article I thought to myself, why not just cut to the chase and write the essay yourself if your putting that much effort into it. But I'm not going to lie sometimes I'm tempted to do it because all you have to do is copy paste the information and then you're done. Now that I've gotten older though, I've realized how severe plagiarism really is. There are a few times where I honestly can't tell if I am plagiarising or if I am just getting key facts from a site, so to be certain I ask someone. Sometimes I wonder what a teacher does when she finds plagiarism in a paper. By that I mean how can she tell if it was intentional or not. Off course plagiarism is plagiarism but there are times where it's unintentional. An example of this is when you need to get key facts about a subject like an exact number, many copy and paste this from a website not knowing whether they should cite it or not. With that said, I think that it's better to be safe than sorry so to eliminate a possibility of plagiarism it's better to double check before handing it in.
As I read through the first article I found it hard to believe how much work people put into looking for the right site to buy their papers from. The most outrageous thing had to be the whole "get papers that were written in 1981!!" how crazy is it. Is our society really that lazy? Let's say that plagiarism is 100% intentional and the people that do it are either too busy to write the paper, too lazy, have several deadlines on that same day or have a family emergency. There is another alternative to getting the work done without plagiarism for each of these excuses. If you've got time to order a paper written by your grandmother's classmate, then you've got time to write your own. If there are too many deadlines approaching, start on your essay in advance and set a daily goal for yourself. Let's say that there is a family emergency that you have to deal with, then email your teacher and let her know the situation and more than likely she will understand and work with you.
The argument in the article "Not That There's Anything Wrong With That" was a too extreme. Missy Chase Lapine sued Jessica Seinfeld for plagiarising some of her ideas. I think that's ridiculous because just because Missy Lapine mentioned that idea in her cookbook doesn't mean others didn't think of it. As I read about Jessica Seinfeld I noticed that she didn't really come up with those ideas and that it was a vast team of nutritionists and art directors that did. That seems a little weird. Why would she get credit for the book if she didn't write it or give any credit to the people that actually wrote it and more importantly why didn't they get the blame?
2 comments:
I completely agree with you in every aspect of your post. Your post brought up some of my points also. How can anyone have the time to go order a paper, but not have the time to write it? By the time I order a paper, I could have written one already. People these days are lazy. Some people don't even look at the paper before they turn it in. How stupid is that? And when they get their grade back and are mad about their D-, they wonder what went wrong? Your view of the Lapine vs. Seinfeld lawsuit is dead on with my assessment. I agree that anyone can use a recipe that someone else invented and then tell everyone that "Betty" made the recipe, and still nobody will like the food or you any less. You made very good points throughout your post.Again, completely agree with you!
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