Plagiarism (Issues That Concern You) - PDF
نویسندگان: Heidi Williams
خلاصه: Writing is difficult, and being a good writer involves count-less skills. Besides spelling and grammar, which seem likeenough to worry about, good writing involves finding your writ-ing voice, expressing your own ideas, and in many cases incor-porating other people’s ideas into the mix. When you need tosupport your opinion with the ideas and expertise of others, writ-ing gets even more difficult, becomes more time-consuming, andplagiarism becomes very tempting.Plagiarism is not just a middle or high school issue. In recentyears, famous journalists, top-ten novelists, university professorsand administrators, and even pastors have succumbed to it.The New York Times, one of the most respected newspapers inthe United States, rocked the journalism world when its notedfeature writer, Jayson Blair, was found to have made up facts andquotes or plagiarized in over thirty articles over a seven-monthperiod, some of them front-page stories. He blamed his unethi-cal behavior on his past use of drugs and bipolar disorder.Steven King, J.K. Rowling, and Dan Brown, three of the mostcelebrated popular fiction writers of our time, have all beentaken to civil court, accused of stealing ideas from other writers.They all claimed innocence.Kaavya Viswanathan, while a freshman at Harvard Univer-sity, wrote a novel that was climbing its way up the New YorkTimes Best Sellers list for hardcover fiction when it was discov-ered that she had taken long passages directly from anothernovel. After her publisher pulled her books and canceled futurecontracts, additional plagiarized passages from other novels werefound. Viswanathan claimed that the obvious copying was acci-dental, a result of her very good memory