1.
Your teacher assigns a seven-page research paper on analyzing some form of media. You pick a popular
documentary as your topic; to get ideas, you spend some time reading reviews on the internet. You copy and paste
interesting sections of the reviews into a Word document as you go, along with some of your own ideas and notes to
yourself. Then you get busy with other work, and come back to the document a few days later. When you open it up
again, you can’t exactly remember which parts were written by you and which parts were copied from the internet, but
you have about seven pages, so that’ good. You change around some sentences so that it sounds better and is well
organized. You turn the paper in. Later, you get an email from your instructor, saying she’s reporting you for plagiarism
and that your essay will receive a “0” grade. When you explain that any plagiarizing you did was a total accident, the
instructor says it doesn’t matter—the paper is still plagiarized. Who is right—the instructor or the student? Isn’t the
instructor being a little bit harsh? What could the student have done differently?
2.
While writing a paper about American history, you want to briefly reference a passage from Martin Luther King’s
“I Have a Dream” speech, but you want to make sure you cite it correctly. You spend some time looking for where it was
published, before you finally find it in an anthology. You cite it as if it was an article from a book, because that’s where
you found it—it’s not as if you heard the speech yourself. But you have some doubts about citing it in this way, and begin
to wonder if maybe this very famous speech doesn’t really need a citation anyway since so many people have become so
familiar with it. Did this student do the right thing? Why or why not?
3. In your culture, attitudes toward plagiarism and using source material in one’s writing are somewhat different. It’s
often assumed that everyone will reference the same handful of recognized intellectuals’ words and opinions, not come up
with their own individual interpretation of everything. Now that you’re going to school at North Seattle Community
College, you see in your syllabus that you can actually fail a writing assignment for copying just a few lines from
someone else’s work. How can that be? How do you balance two different cultural approaches to the use of source
material?
4. You find an article during research that’s perfect as a source for your paper…almost too perfect. It says everything
you ever wanted to say about gender roles in computer games, only much better and in more detail. You start writing the
paper, then realize you’re quoting from the source (with proper citations) so much that you might as well be copying it.
What is the problem? Can you quote too much? What should the student do?
5. When I was in college, I’d sometimes write a single paper that would satisfy assignments in more than one course. For
instance, I once wrote a paper on how “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” expressed satire; I submitted it for
assignments in both my poetry course as well as my completely separate satire course. I did not disclose this to either
professor. When I share this with people, half call the practice cheating, and the other half call it genius. My niece told me
it would certainly be grounds for expulsion at her college. In my mind, I was adding a level of intellectual complexity to
my studies. Was this an ethical practice, or was I cheating? (From NYT’s “The Ethicist” column)
6. In your English class, your instructor requires a one-page, written summary/response to each of the assigned readings.
You find one of the readings to be very difficult to understand due to the vocabulary used by the author as well as an
unusual writing style that seems to hide his main point from you. Therefore, to help you write your response, you go
online and find a review of this reading that describes the writer’s ideas in much simpler language. Once you read this
review, you find that it exactly reflects your own attitude toward the reading, so you add a paraphrase of two paragraphs
from the review to your response. You don’t cite the source for the added ideas since the opinions expressed in the online
review perfectly match your own opinions about the reading and you’ve paraphrased it, anyway. Nobody owns opinions,
do they? While most of us might agree that writers have some ownership of the words that they write, do they also
own their opinions and ideas, as well? Is what this student did an example of plagiarism? Why or why not?
7. You are in English 101 this quarter and are really struggling with the longer essays that you have to write in this class.
Your friend took this same class with the same theme from the same teacher two quarters ago, and you really like one of
the research papers that she wrote. You like her topic and decide to write on the same one. Your friend gives you a copy
of her paper to use as a guide and you begin to build your paper. After you’ve worked for a few weeks and written a
number of pages, you realize that you’ve made use of some organizing patterns and thematic ideas from your friend’s
paper. You now worry whether or not this paper can be considered plagiarized. Would you consider this a plagiarized
paper? Why or why not?