Misc
As the essays you write get more complicated, I’m finding that my comments get longer, and thus easier to write as notes to myself rather than as marginal notes in Google docs. So you’ll find far fewer comments in your shared Enigma essays than in past essays, and less duplication between them and my in-person comments.
Questions?
Plagiarism
Examples
In groups, try to find examples of web pages containing identical text.
Decide which of the examples you find constitute plagiarism, and why or why not. If possible, determine who copied from whom.
Each group presents/describes its favorite findings.
Hints on Finding Examples
Find some document related to a subject popular enough that other people are likely to write about it. This could be a paper document, result of an online search, etc.
Do a Google (or your favorite search engine) search for a distinctive phrase from that document, maybe but not necessarily from near the beginning. Enclosing a phrase in quotation marks will usually do a search for that exact phrase, e.g.,
“Enigma was a German cipher system”
Findings and Discussion
Joe Biden was accused of plagiarizing part of a speech from Neal Kinnock:
Kinnock: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Was it because they were weak, those people who worked eight hours underground and then come up and play football, weak? It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”
Biden: “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family to ever go to a university? Was it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because they didn’t work hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.”
This is a good example of how copying someone else’s style and overall idea constitutes plagiarism even if the words differ.
A more word-for-word similar example is a speech by Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari in which parts were taken from an earlier speech by Barack Obama (http://www.signalng.com/president-buhari-accused-plagiarising-obama-launch-changebeginswithme/). The speechwriter who “wrote” Buhari’s speech was later fired.
Compare the description of Enigma at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/enigma to the one in the presentation at https://prezi.com/gznywzslw3rj/enigma-project/. This is a good example of typical student plagiarism, copying text from a source into an essay, presentation, etc. (While that is the form a lot of student plagiarism takes, note that we don’t know for sure in this particular example that the presentation author is a student, or that he copied from the BBC instead of vice versa.)
Or compare http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/23/news/mn-26260 to https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2000/09-23/0013_carpathia__titanic_rescue_boatloc.html.
Note that when major web sites share each others’ content with minimal acknowledgement, they may actually have worked out deals that permit them to do so. So you may see sharing on the web that’s legitimate in ways that aren’t available in typical college writing.
Another example: note the similarity between the lyrics to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and Gordon Jenkins’s “Crescent City Blues.”
Note that you can plagiarize things other than text, e.g., images, videos, music, etc.
Next
Rhetoric and logic in arguments.
Do the “Rhetorical Context” unit in INTD 106.