Plagiarism

Well, Wednesday in class we had some pretty interesting stories about plagiarism... Stories like that are always fun to hear for some reason. I'm looking forward to doing the Plagiarism assignment because I think it's sometimes easier to plagiarize than to be original. It depends on the topic, but with all the new technology that we've seen in our lives so far, it's hard to actually be original. How do we know that what we come up with and think is our own mind's work, isn't already out there, expressed by someone else. There are only so many words, and only so many ways to put things. Sooner or later, like Deborah Brandt mentioned, we will be essentially cutting and pasting our compositions rather than actually creating them.

As far as ghostwriting goes...that's a difficult subject to interpret. I'm glad that we're studying ghostwriting and plagiarism back-to-back, because to me, they don't seem all that different, and it makes me think, "If plagiarism is so bad, then why is it happening so often in the form of ghostwriting?" I read the University's policy (short one online) on plagiarism, and while reading, I kept thinking to myself, "It sounds just like they are defining ghostwriting." I guess it's okay to plagiarize as long as the real author is being paid for it. I wonder what the University's policy on ghostwriting is...