Blog Post #10

One story I can think of is a time when I was having a conversation with a friend about our classes and all the work we had coming up. I was telling her about all the papers I had to write and she was telling me about her heavy workload. Somewhere in the conversation she said that papers were really easy to do. Her reason for papers being easy wasn't because she enjoyed writing, or because she had come up with an awesome writing process that works for her, but because its so easy to paraphrase. She didn't see anything wrong with it because she said "I never copy things WORD FOR WORD, but it's okay to use the thesaurus feature and make it your own.". I imagine this is a common story when it comes to student's thoughts on plagiarism, and that many students do this and feel this way. I especially think this is true for students who aren't writing or english majors because they probably don't have many classes that have lessons on coming up with your own writing process or properly citing your sources. I really didn't dwell on this conversation much, but it's something I remember because I wish I would've told her that was a form of plagiarism, just for future reference, since she seemed so oblivious. To her, she thought other students were just clueless on how EASY it was to write a good paper.