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The Truth About Plagiarism By Richard A. Posner

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In his essay, "The Truth About Plagiarism," Richard A. Posner disrupts the prevailing narrative that plagiarism is an unforgivable intellectual transgression. As a distinguished judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner's authority on legal and ethical matters is unquestionable. He challenges the commonly held belief that plagiarism constitutes the ultimate intellectual crime, urging readers to adopt a more nuanced perspective on this contentious issue. Posner's audience spans a wide spectrum, including writers, teachers, journalists, scholars, and the general public. Citing recent plagiarism scandals involving prominent individuals like Jayson Blair, Posner highlights the relevance of his argument in contemporary discourse. He evokes empathy by illustrating the devastating consequences of plagiarism, such as career derailment for politicians, expulsion for college students, and reputational damage for writers, scholars, and journalists. This emotional appeal resonates with readers, emphasizing the human toll of plagiarism scandals. …show more content…

He asserts, "If a thief steals your car, you are out the market value of the car; but if a writer copies material from a book you wrote, you don't have to replace the book." This distinction underscores the ethical complexity of plagiarism and challenges readers to reconsider its societal implications. Posner's expertise as a legal scholar enhances the credibility of his argument. He further states, "Plagiarism can be a form of fraud, but it is no accident that, unlike real theft, it is not a crime." This distinction between plagiarism and criminal theft highlights the unique ethical considerations

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In Loye Youngs's essay, “Is Humiliation an Ethically Appropriate Response to Plagiarism?” Loye Young claims that the action he took against students who plagiarized is valid. He justifies his claim by listing his moral beliefs and using an example of Senator Joseph Biden plagiarism story. Six students were caught for a common act, they all submitted a plagiarized paper. Loye Young states that even after a well-reviewed and clear syllabus he is "surprised by how common and blatant plagiarism turned out to be" (Young, 191).

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Leonard Pitts crafts a judgmental tone through repetition, his choice of diction, antithesis, and personal anecdotes to convince his audience that plagiarism is despicable and a complete dishonor to the struggle of original writers and literature itself. Pitts carefully chooses his words to create a critical tone in the open letter. It is most apparent when he refers to Cecil’s plagiarism as theft. He repeatedly calls Cecil’s actions theft because it brings the reader’s attention to how Cecil’s decision to plagiarize Pitts is stealing and disrespectful to literature. Since thievery is a crime most people are well aware of, the reader is compelled to criticize Cecil for doing something so obviously wrong.

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Finally, it is encouraged to pretend that a writer’s work is original with no outside influence. That their ideas were not the evolution and transformation of another’s. Even though plagiarism seeks to protect the intellectual property of the writer, it fails to understand that borrowing

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It's two o'clock in the morning, and a student sits in a dark, quiet bedroom, his face illuminated only by the glow of his laptop. The silence is punctuated by the rhythmic tapping of keys as he struggles through composing the fifth page of the twenty that are required for his research paper due tomorrow morning, only a few short hours away. The student begins the slow, grueling process of paraphrasing and citing his source, when suddenly, a sense of overwhelming fatigue falls over him. Giving up, he copies and pastes the information into his own document, scrambling it a bit before printing it out and shoving it in his binder. A situation like the one this student encountered is not uncommon, but the choice to plagiarize has innumerable consequences

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Plagiarism As a student of Walden University, I am expected and held accountable for the integrity of any work that I write and submit. Walden University’s code of conduct on academic integrity states, “A student who enrolls at the university thereby agrees to respect and acknowledge the research and ideas of others in his or her work and to abide by those regulations governing work stipulated by the academic unit or academic program, and, in turn, the instructor” (Walden University, 2014). The first violation of academic integrity is plagiarism. According to Walden University (2014), “plagiarism is defined as use of intellectual material produced by another person without acknowledging its source.”

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I think you brought some good points regarding Maureen’s plagiarism at the end of your first paragraph. Even though she found out that Joe Biden was accused of plagiarism and knew that plagiarism is something that none should have done, she did the same thing. If a person do the something wrong in regardless of what a person realized before, it is not an accident. It is wrong and intentional. I think we already learn about plagiarism and heard of it enough, so we should not doing it and do it our own just like how you pointed

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Plagiarism is defined as the act of representing the work of someone else as your own (AERA, 2011; APA, 2010; APA, 2012; Cozby & Bates, 2012; Creswell, 2014). According to Fisher & Partin (2014), there are two forms of plagiarism, which are deliberate and accidental. Deliberate plagiarism is the intentional attempt to pass off the work of someone else as your own, and accidental plagiarism is unknowingly using the work of someone else without proper citation and referencing (Fisher & Partin, 2014). Commonly, plagiarism is thought of as submitting someone else’s work for an essay or school report and can include submitting the entire artifact as your own, or using a small portion of the work, such as paragraph or sentence without properly citing the original author (Cozby & Bates, 2012). Submitting someone else’s work in place of completing the work themselves is an ethical dilemma most students understand; however, oftentimes, students do not understand that it is equally important to cite the ideas of others even when expressed in their own words.

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In any school you have attended, plagiarism is a situation that a writer should not put themselves in under any circumstances. When reading the essay “Something Borrowed,” Malcolm Gladwell gave insight into the flaws of plagiarism that writers may not have thought about before. The first being that plagiarism is never acceptable (927). The second issue with plagiarism is recognizing the differences that can or cannot “inhibit creativity” (931). Being inspired by another person's work can help and guide you to build your own ideas, but simply taking their work and claiming it as yours is not permitted.

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Or, as the writer T.S. Elliot once said: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Universities aren’t teaching job skills This debate surrounding plagiarism is indicative of a wider discussion going on about the role universities play in training the next generation of

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Gladwell develops this idea that some forms of plagiarism aren’t crimes by using the similarities that occur in music “he sat down at the piano again and played the beginning of both songs, one after the other; sure enough, they sounded strikingly similar... Same sequence,” and proposes that, specifically in the music industry, one cannot place ownership on notes because they are just pitches on a scale that any one can play; however plagiarism exists when a well-known sequence of notes is reproduced and replicated with full knowledge of one’s act of replication. Using examples from many different pop-culture genres (music, theatre), Gladwell provides instances in which plagiarism is overlooked as mere coincidence, as well as instances in which plagiarism results in a destroyed reputation (British playwright Bryony Lavery, Frozen), or loss of employment (Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) in order to provoke discussion about the severity of plagiarism, and illustrate how ideas become “...part of the archive of human knowledge...and, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they

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One of the most crucial traits a scholar can develop is a high level of self-efficacy which is essential to academic success. The ability to achieve and to recognize that success can come from being industrious should be the deterring factor for a student who considers committing the act of plagiarism. What is plagiarism one might ask? Voelker, Love & Pentina (2012) define plagiarism as, “putting forward another’s work as your own” (p. 37). This very pervasive problem plagues the education system, and many researchers and psychologist seek to explain the driving force behind students’ academic dishonesty.

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Plagiarism as a Threat to College Students and the Public The term plagiarism is used to describe the unauthorized acquisition or use of pictures, informations, work or ideas intentionally or unintentionally and passing them off as their own ideas. In “Plagiarism as a Threat to Public Identity”, Shonda Gibson and Stephen Reysen of Texas A&M University -Commerce examines the experience of plagiarism as an illustration of an interpersonal threat to the public identity. In this article the author argues and analysis that, people who practice plagiarism by stealing one's ideas and making it their own legitimately do it on purpose attempting to harm the participants public image which leads to subsequent confrontation with the victim involved.

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