This is the VOA Special English Education Report.
Plagiarism
is the act of representing another person's words or ideas as your own. The
offense may be as small as a sentence copied from a book. Or it may be as
extensive as a whole paper copied -- or bought -- from somebody else.
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Journalism students at the University of Maryland discuss ethics and plagiarism in a class in October 2003 |
Intellectual
dishonesty is nothing new. The only difference now is that the Internet has
made it much simpler to steal other people's work. Yet the same technology that
makes it easy to find information to copy also makes it easier to identify plagiarism.
Teachers can use online services that compare papers to
thousands of others to search for copied work. The teacher gets a report on any
passages that are similar enough to suspect plagiarism. These services are
widely used. Turnitin.com, for example, says it is used in more than one
hundred countries and examines more than one hundred thirty thousand papers a
day.
Professional
writers who plagiarize can be taken to civil court and ordered to pay damages. In
schools, the punishment for cheating could be a failing grade on the paper or
in the course. Some schools expel plagiarists for a term; others, for a full
academic year. Some degrees have even been withdrawn after a school later found
that a student had plagiarized.
Accidental plagiarism can sometimes result from
cultural differences.
At Indiana University in Bloomington, sixty percent of
students who use the Office of Writing Tutorial Services are non-native English
speakers. The director, Joanne Vogt, says some have no idea that copying
from published works is considered wrong. She says students from China, for
example, may think they are insulting readers if they credit other sources. They
believe that educated readers should already know where the information came
from.
The more you give credit, the less you risk accusations
of plagiarism. Any sentences taken directly from a source should appear inside
quotation marks. And even if you put those sentences into your own words, you
should still give credit to where you got the information.
And that's the VOA Special English Education Report,
written by Nancy Steinbach. More about plagiarism next week. We will also
discuss other rules for academic writing in the United States. Earlier reports
in our Foreign Student Series are at voaspecialenglish.com -- along with links
to some writing resources at American universities. I'm Steve Ember.