(Referring to other people's stuff!)
| What is citation? | |||||
When we write college essays, we don't just use our own ideas and talk about our own opinions and experiences. Depending on the essay question, we may also have to talk about other people's writing, i.e. poems, stories, plays, literary essays etc., but we may also have to talk about other people's writing ABOUT other people's writing! Yes! You may have to read essays, articles, or reviews of literature or other arts and have to write about what the author thought about those things! So, you are the author of your essay - but you may not be the only author IN your essay! There's you, maybe a poet or two, a critic, possibly a playwright, an encyclopedia editor, or maybe even a historian! Who said what becomes very important; we always have to be precise and careful about whose ideas belong to whom, and which ideas are actually our own. When we cite, we use these other authors' words and ideas, but we don't just quote directly using quotation marks; we also paraphrase or sometimes just comment on the other ideas and use those ideas to help create ideas of our own - this is called intellectual discourse. This all gets very confusing!!! Worse still, you run the risk of committing a crime while trying to write about what other people wrote! What crime? A terrible crime - a crime punishable by legal action and even expulsion from college! (Or death if the original author catches you...) What are we talking about?
|
| 
|
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is stealing. Stealing? Yes, stealing. Plagiarism is when you use somebody else's words or ideas and pass them off as your own. You may not do this on purpose, but if you plagiarize, you plagiarize, purposely or not. There is no excuse for it EVER. So, the important thing is to avoid doing it at all costs. Why is it such a serious matter? Why could you be expelled from college for doing it? Because as academics we trade in words and ideas and images. That is all we have. Our words and ideas are valuable and they belong to us. If you take them from someone, you have stolen something of value and tried to get recognition and, thus, value from them. It's like stealing a car radio then selling it and keeping the money.
|
|
|
 Safe Citing
|
