My Word! Plagiarism and the College Culture by anthropologist Susan Blum (Cornell University Press) has great application for those of us past our college years. It's a reminder to all of us who "read something somewhere" or "heard someone state a well-worded comment or conclusion" that creating a collage of other peoples' words and ideas violates the ethics of attribution whether or not that seems to be part of some archaic set of laws. According to a review in The Wall Street Journal, Ms Blum claims that we can "only partly blame the students who cheat as they have aborbed the cultural messages about competition, success multi-tasking and the bottomline." I taught my intermediate and middle school students how, when and why to use quotation marks and indirect quotes. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't that hard to do.
Ms Blum makes the point that a post-college culture will pose challenges for those who have few qualms about lifting, borrowing, cutting and pasting. They may call it "plagiarism" in college but when the laws of intellectual property are violated, it's called intellectual property infringement and it's actionable. I know. I have an attorney who has protected my books and me from the "heavy lifters".
Maybe we need to reteach quotation mark rules before these heavy lifters face legal action. Reviewer Christine Rosen makes a salient point: "Steal someone else's words and they shrug. Steal their IPODS and now you have their attention."
Attention must be paid. Intention must be paid as well.
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I am from Leone and also now teach English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "First despite the food it has assessed, part price book has closely been used outside of geographic process acquisition parties."
With love ;), Margot.
Posted by: Margot | September 09, 2009 at 07:40 AM