Plagiarism Fears
27 05 2009To me, plagiarism means to steal someone’s work and make it your own. Before all the readings, I thought I knew a lot about plagiarism but after these readings, I realized I don’t. I had no idea that if you didn’t cite something 100% correctly then it can be counted as plagiarism. I did learn that I always have a hard time determining when a piece of information is common knowledge. The whole idea of common knowledge is so complex. I mean, I understand that “an orange is a fruit,” but when you’re writing a Sociology paper, it is common knowledge that conflict theorists focus on the inequalities among different types of groups of people. While this is common knowledge of Sociologists, it is not common knowledge to a lot of people who aren’t involved in the discipline. I guess my question is, how do we determine what exactly is common knowledge when we are writing a paper centered around a certain theme, like this class?
When I am writing a paper, I am so scared that I will cite something incorrectly, and will lose points (if not fail) for making an honest mistake. If someone steals another person’s paper then they deserve to fail, but my biggest fear is that I will unknowingly make an error and be punished for something that I really didn’t mean to do. This actually does stem from a horror story of someone I know. Someone in one of my classes actually did plagiarize and didn’t mind filling people in on it. This was really stupid because this person did get caught. I saw what happened, he failed not only the paper, but the class and then had to be taken in front of the judicial board. Plagiarizing is serious business, so I try to make sure I don’t make any mistakes in citing. While this happened to someone who stole the whole paper, I don’t want to risk anything to ruin my reputation as a serious student and researcher.
While taking notes on my paper and organizing all of my sources, I’m not finding any problems with citing and paraphrasing. I try to never quote in a paper, and if I absolutely have to, I try to make sure it’s just one sentence that is NEEDED for the paper. I typically try to shy away from quotations though. One thing I do to paraphrase my articles is print out the whole article, highlight the main points and re-write what I highlighted in my own words on the margins of the article. This usually helps me pick out what I want in my paper and ensures that I am using my own words and not the author’s.
I just commented to Keith on common knowledge, and you can read that, but your question is a good one. Indeed “conflict theorists focus on inequalities” is “common knowledge” in sociology. My take on that is to think of the audience. In writing a graduate level paper, I don’t think you would need to cite that. The audience for that writing would understand that such a statement is basic in sociology. However, I would want a freshman in an intro class to cite (even their textbook) if giving that information. They wouldn’t know that such information was common knowledge in the discipline and the goal of their paper would be to tell me what they know and have learned through research. However, it a student didn’t cite it, I wouldn’t say that was plagiarism. If a student did cite it, it’s just more support for his/her assertion.
I think you’ve got a good system of note taking. I agree that quotes should not be over-used, but don’t be afraid of them either. Sometimes a nice, pithy quote can be very effective.