" HEY THIEF YOU ARE CAUGHT!!! "
" Who? "
" YOU! YES YOU ARE A THIEF! "
" No, I'm not a thief! I'm just copying and pasting. "
Nobody wants to be called as thief, right? Everyone agrees that thief is steal, means that a thief is someone who steal others properties such as money, vehicle, jewellery or other 'seen' things without the owner's permission. Yes, they are bad people. They should be punished! They will be imprisoned!
Heyyyyyy same goes to us if we plagiarize others work. We should also be called as thief because we are stealing others work in the form of language, ideas, thoughts, expressions and art works without the writer's acknowledge by copying and pasting those works and clarify them as ours. To me, if i am the writer, and i found others work that is perfectly same as mine, I will get angry. My original and fresh ideas are being used by irresponsible person for his or her own benefit. It happened once to me when i updated a status on Facebook about my opinion on one issue. The status is quite long, I gathered ideas, points, proofs and I referred to many kind of legitimate sources before posting it. But then I saw someone that I don't even know her (since she was only a facebook's friend) copied my status 100% same and posted it on her wall and stated that it was her's. Of course she did not ask for my permission first. At that moment, I was nagging to myself "WHAT A THIEF HAH THIS WOMAN! I WILL NEVER BLESS YOUR LIFE" hahaha. I was so angry.
According to Oxford dictionary (online version, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com) plagiarize means take (the work or an idea of someone else) and pass it off as one’s own. However, plagiarism can be defined as "In an instructional setting, plagiarism occurs
when a writer deliberately uses someone else’s language, ideas, or other
original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its
source." ( Council of Writing Program Administrators, January, 2003 ). From this simple definition,we can clearly understand what plagiarism is, right? As a student, I'm pretty sure that we ever plagiarized others work especially when we are completing our last-minutes assignment. What is on our mind is " arghh I don't care of i just copy and past this article, as long as I submit this assignment and get high marks and the lecturer will be impressed with my work, lalalala~ "
Poor us, because we might be forgetful that the lecturers are 100 times cleverer than us so they know very well which is their students original work and which is the fake one. At the end at the semester, when the final result come out, we cried all day long and keep asking,
"why do i get as low as this grade? I did my job very well. I produced my own article perfectly"
nahhhhh. it is actually, "I COPIED AND PASTED VERY WELL"
How can we avoid from plagiarizing? The simplest and easiest way is to paraphrase the ideas. Paraphrasing is doing modification with the use of our own words by not changing the main ideas. We can use the synonym of the words. Besides that, we can also put all quotes that we get from an article of researches in quotation. (",") Never forget to mention the author's name if we use their definition, thoughts, language or expression. For example,
" It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" - Aristotle.
(photo from http://backtogodhead.in/aristotle-and-his-teachings)
Here, I would like to remind my own self and my friends to avoid or if we have started it, we should stop plagiarizing others works by now. This is because, this kind of habit will not gonna work. We do not feel the satisfaction if we are being praised on others ideas and hard works. Just be honest with ourselves. There is no point if we produce a five pages of essay if we copy and paste phrases form articles on the internet compared to a one page of essay but we write it on our own, we think critically the ideas and construct with a perfect sentences, it will be better.
Simpson asks us to keep this thing in mind! (^,^)
(photo from http://blogs.fit.edu/blog/student-stories/vasudev/zero-tolerance-for-plagiarism/#.VChAXUDNlLA )
