Plagiarism- How to ruin your life with one intelligent thought expressed poorly!

Plagiarism has always been a deep dark fear in my English writing. In most cases, anytime I needed to quote something in a paper, I found myself with tons of anxiety towards how to properly cite and quote the information.  On top of that, every syllabus I have ever seen has had a clause for plagiarism with added detail of all the lovely horrible things that will happen if you are found plagiarizing.  I was very happy with the Styles Manual article by Sampsel which showcases the different types of plagiarism. I think the unintentional plagiarism is the most daunting concept to corrupt one’s enjoyment of writing papers. But Sampel has given one trick that I’m excited to try.  The trick being to wait thirty minutes after reading something to better distance yourself from the topic that the author was trying to convey. I was thankful to have this as a reference tool to remind myself of the different types so I can better check for unintentional Plagiarism as well as others.

Ithaca library’s plagiarism quiz was actually quite entertaining. Well I guess academically entertaining, but entertaining nonetheless. I was interested in who picked the image choices for this website page, it was an amazing selection. I didn’t really find the questions too difficult, but one stuck out as annoying in terms of me not properly understanding para-phrasing in the terms of too little or too much. Thus causing plagiarism unintentionally. This quiz also tied in with the following reading by Dr. Crystal Sands.

This blurb about how to handle plagiarism when dealing with both true and untrue claims, which I now wished I had more practice doing proper citation and quoting before being in grad school. I enjoy the examples used by Sands, but while I enjoyed hearing how this related to politics of the day, I was as interest far more in the other reading, which might be because of Sand’s writing style. Also the blurb from Sand’s didn’t keep my interest level through out the reading. I even thought it was because I was tired and tried reading it later and found it still to being different in terms of how it was related. Overall I think if she treated this more like a formal academic article, it might have been more insight with citations.

Lastly, saving the best for last, Kenneth Goldsmith. My new hero, Goldsmith has a very important take about today’s world of information. When dealing with concepts, he feels that most things have been created, thus pointing towards it in terms of how we plagiarize to today might be more valid when applying them to art. His idea to drop the worth of the art (its value in terms of money) towards freeing the art is quite intriguing. While this practice doesn’t really work with living in America. But I had two favorite parts of Goldsmith’s podcast, besides the poem “traffic”, I really enjoyed this quote, “the camera forced painting to go abstract”. This in terms of how technology has changed art’s usefulness and its form of express is a very unique and evolving medium.  

            The reading this week was quite terrifying, but Goldsmith made me feel much better overall. While I’m going to review all of my annotations, I’m happy to add these to my growing resource wall of “how to properly write something” folder on my laptop.