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Brief 4: Plagiarism and Fabrication

Plagiarism: Often Accidental, Never Good.

Plagiarism is something. It's an awful, terrible, no-good something that everyone deals with at least once in their life, especially college students. As I'm about to demonstrate, plagiarism is the act of stealing someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as your own. I, of course, came up with that definition myself and definitely didn't steal those words from anyone or anything else as the image below will prove.
I totally stole that definition from Google.
On a much more critical scale, stealing other's work and claiming it as your own is a very big deal. It leads to a lot of trouble for everyone involved. University students who are accused of plagiarism essentially go through a courtroom-esque trial with members of the school board to defend themselves. Sadly in the case of plagiarism, it seems as if the defendant is guilty until proven innocent.

I have a pretty extensive list of encounters with plagiarism, but I'll quickly discuss two of them. Firstly in Comp. II my second semester here at SAU, I completely forgot to put a citation page after writing a film review in which I included statistics about particular actors in the film. Even though I didn't think it was a very big deal after the fact, I understand the importance of knowing where questionable information comes from.

My second run-in with plagiarism comes from my roommate my Freshman year. My roommate, James, was involved in a history project that was done as a group assignment, four people in particular. Each individual on the assignment had a particular segment of a paper to write for the project and one of the individuals had plagiarized some of their segment of the paper. This resulted in every member of the group to be questioned and punished, including James, who was afraid he would not be able to graduate due to the plagiarism issue. Luckily, he got off with a slap-on the wrist and graduated while the real culprit was dealt with.

Most of the time, we don't think about plagiarism. We're often used to being believed. When I state a fact somewhere, whether it be person-to-person, online, or in a paper, I've already done the research I've needed to and I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. However, other's words that I've read into may creep into my vocabulary. It's like being around your friends; their lingo begins to become yours.

When thinking of plagiarism, other than school papers, I tend to think of music and how often artists can imitate one another. The parody laws make things difficult for lawsuits, such as Weird Al Yankovic's illustrious career of parodying popular songs with very little friction. Johnny Cash was
involved in a lawsuit when his song 'Folsom Prison Blues' mimicked Gordon Jenkins' song 'Crescent City Blues'.

One last thing I'd like to touch on is 'subconscious plagiarism', when you plagiarize without the intent of plagiarizing. This is a big issue as you're essentially incriminating yourself during your defense as for subconscious plagiarism to occur, you must have interacted or seen the thing you are accused of copying. Helen Keller was found to had subconsciously plagiarized one of her stories. It's a lose-lose situation really.

Just be careful, folks. Be mindful and post those links!

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