Will I get caught for plagiarism?

harvestmoon
Fri, 26 Sep 2014 10:30:07 +0000

It really isn’t worth it. I work in a writing center, and students try to plagiarize all the time. It’s so blatantly obvious because they’ll have some parts written by them and some parts written by the other people, causing a HUGE shift in voice and tone. And vocabulary.

The whole point of writing papers in college (and especially academic research pieces) is to show how you can read and synthesize information and then blend that together with your own words and your own new ideas.

I’m in the boat where I see plagiarism as more of a reading problem. You either didn’t read anything and so need someone else’s words or you didn’t try to understand it and so just used someone else’s words. If you carefully work through each piece and really try to understand it, you’ll be able to paraphrase it effectively and use it to back up what you’re trying to say.

It’s better to have an honest, late paper than an on-time, plagiarized one. If you really did copy most of it, then your prof will probably find out, especially if it’s a popular work in the field or something.