At first I wrote my paper (on the topic of the history of Roman paintings) the way I normally would, including my own ideas/reflections and sources. After I took out all of the sources, I still only had a 25% plagiarized paper so I was forced to take out some of my own ideas and add in more plagiarized ones. I eventually ended up plagiarizing over 90% of my paper, and then had to scale it back and put some of my own knowledge back in. This was a huge struggle for me; I found it very hard to balance the amount that my paper was plagiarized.
Another aspect of this project that was challenging was hiding my sources. My paper was very factual and leaned toward being a research paper, so there was much information on the web about it, as well as great books to use. My initial thought was that the plagiarism would then be hard to spot in the exact source because many websites say essentially the same things, just in a different word order. This also then brought up a dilemma though, what if I plagiarized something I didn't mean to-what if the information I thought of on my own was really in a website?
Along with the physical writing of the paper, the hardest challenge for me was being comfortable with the situation. Even though our assignment was to plagiarize, I could not help but feel guilty performing this act. As I mentioned in class, I am an over-quoter normally, so it was especially hard for me to just disregard sources. I thought the ghostwriting paper brought up a moral dilemma for me but jeez, I still feel guilty about this paper. How could anyone actually turn in a paper and a) think they are not going to get caught and b) live with themselves for the agonizing weeks that it takes to get the paper back? Now, seeing as how this was an assignment, I am sure I will get over my guilt; however if I turned in a plagiarized paper outside of this assignment, I feel like I would be haunted by it every time I had to hand in a paper for the rest of my college career.
This being said, I enjoyed the opportunity to experience plagiarism, and I did in fact learn more about my writing style. I am also looking forward to searching for other people's plagiarism!
Since my paper was about the history of Roman Paintings, here is one of my favorites by Raphael called "The Nymph Galatea"
5 comments:
I ran into the same dilemma when I was trying to uncover some plagiarisms. I found multiple sites containing the same historical information and it was very difficult to pinpoint the precise site the information was taken from.
It was hard for me, too, to balance what I plagiarized and what I came up with on my own. I actually still think I plagiarized more than 75%, oops. I said in my blog post that it would just be easier to plagiarize an entire essay/article from one source, just copy, paste, done. It is totally unethical...I don't know how I could stand it, especially if i got an A!
As one of the two people who actually read your plagiarized paper, I can say that you must have done a great job hiding everything. I couldn't find a singe instance of plagiarism in your paper.. or at least could never find the sources that you used! Also, I can totally relate to what you said about only have 25% plagiarized content at first. I ran into the same problem and felt like i was killing myself putting in more and more of another person's ideas and trying to pass them off as my own.
It wasn't that I was completely emotionally detached from what I was doing or that I lack the imagination to conceptualize the experience of dealing with the ethical dilemas that are related to plagarism, but rather that there seemed to be an unavoidable realization that there was no inherent risk or consequence related to plagarising for an assgnment. When I said the project seemed easy, I meant in terms of having the majority of the creative and conceptual work done by somebody else.
Ha, hold on a second. You definitely dind't offend me in any way, and I didn't take your post to mean that you felt I was not creative. I was simply stating where I was coming from and noticing the differences in how we each approached the topic/ felt about it afterwards. I definitely understand where you are coming from with the guilt factor, and I can see how that would make the project quite difficult. Don't feel bad or appologetic about your post at all. I am surprised that you interpreted my comments the way you did, in fact, that kind of offends me (just kidding).
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