Plagiarism Reflection

I found the plagiarism experience intriguing, yet frustrating. As if typing a paper on a Friday night after a long week isn’t frustrating enough, I became more frustrated on how time consuming the actual experience was. When we were assigned this paper, my immediate reaction was that this will be one of the simplest papers I’ll be able to whip up, without too much heavy thinking. In fact, my paper entitled “The Modern Epidemic” dealing with the current issues of obesity, had me searching through numerous articles and textbooks, becoming more and more frustrated that they were not using the same tense of voice I was, or for using words I would have never thought up on my own. This paper opened my eyes to a whole new view on plagiarism and also made me realize I will probably not be doing much plagiarizing in any future writing assignments.

Prior to this assignment, my ‘cut-and-dry’ definition of plagiarism is directly stealing an article, word for word from another, and inserting it into a paper that you claim you have written independently. After this experience, I have come to an addition to my definition: stealing a particular style of writing or even thoughts that do not belong to you. During my paper I would read a section in my Nutrition textbook and then when I began to put it in my paper (not part of the plagiarized part) I realized that I could not do that if this had been an actual scientific paper without citing that source, because although it makes sense to me now and almost like common knowledge, I would not have known that had I just read what the author of that textbook had written.

Dealing with style, the articles I found on the internet few were quick articles that made the point it was trying to reach directly. This style is opposite of mine because I like to elaborate more when I attempt to get my point across. Even if I was not trying to plagiarize this paper, I feel that if I stole this writing style, created by another individual, that this would be a form of plagiarizing, simply because it is not my own.

Given the university’s plagiarism policy, I seem to agree more on the point of stealing from another individual and calling it your own. “Stealing” could be more highly defined, though, in my opinion. Is stealing simply just stealing words directly from another or a text, or is stealing related to a person’s style or the way they word things? As I the simple word “plagiarize” could not be defined more in depth, this experience has defiantly changed my mind.