Friday, January 18, 2013

Unit 2: Plagiarism

Purdue OWL
Safe Practices: An Exercise

  1. This passage is correct, it was the author's own idea/experience and so it doesn't need to be cited.
  2. This passage to me could go either way, taken out of context I'm not sure the correct answer. It could be the author's option, or they might have paraphrased or direct quoted it from another source. If it is a paraphrase or a direct quote then it needs to be acknowledged and if it is the author's opinion then it doesn't need to be acknowledged.
  3. This passage is not cited correctly, though it is mostly an option the author references a percentage and unless they made that percentage up, than a statement referencing the source and including the source in the bibliography is needed.
  4. This passage is a paraphrase of Dr. King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail." Though he included a statement referencing the author of the source the writer doesn't site the name of the source and where in the source it occurs. The term "social analysis" could be in be in quotes also.
  5. This passage is correctly cited. It is paraphrased and directly quoted. The parts that are direct quotes are in quotation marks and it and the paraphrase section include a statement referencing the author and a citation with the name of the source and the location within the source.
  6. This passage is correct except they did not acknowledge the source and location within the source after the quotes.
  7. This passage is correct, I think, though the author references the opinion of a friend, I think it would fall under common knowledge?
  8. This passage doesn't need to be acknowledged as it is common knowledge.
This unit opened my eyes to some mistakes I've been making the past two years. Though I graduate this quarter I know that I will be much more careful in the business world when it comes to using sources and correctly citing them. More often than not college students are not intentionally plagiarizing. It seems to me there should be more of an emphasis on teaching the correct ways to cite and reference sources. I have been attending Clark College for two years and even after taking English 101, I feel like my understanding of citing and referencing sources is lacking. Style guides such as my Gregg's Reference Manual and websites such as Purdue's Online Writing Lab will be invaluable to me in the future, whether I continue on with school now or in the future.
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1 comment:

  1. abullockJanuary 19, 2013 at 2:33 PM

    Hi, Christina:

    You seem to have a good handle on how to avoid plagiarism. This exercise is a bit weird because you are usually reading other students papers to decide if they plagiarized or not but it was a good way to try and see common mistakes and examples that are close but not quite. It is certainly more of a focus in academic writing but when you enter the business world it is also important to give credit to your sources, perhaps without using citation but attribution in a report or something but the idea is solid, if you use someone else's words, research or ideas then you should acknowledge that.

    Your strategy to rely on style guides and online resources is a solid one and I constantly use OWL to get the periods and commas in the right place.

    Cheers,
    Andrea

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