Plagiarism? Are you Kidding?

Plagiarism? Are you Kidding?

There are two characters in the video “Plagiarism? Are you Kidding?” a man and a woman, and they have a conversation about the purpose of citing. In their conversation, the man simply thinks we only cite to let professor know we read the article conscientiously which he considered as waste of time. The woman, however, points out that to show our understanding to the source can be one purpose but the purposes of citing are more than that. She illustrates that we also cite others’ ideas in order to back up our own opinion with powerful sources, which means by doing this we can gain more agreement from readers. What’s more, others’ ideas are their intelligent property, when we use the ideas we ought to cite to show our respect to those owners. The man argues that it’s hard to change all words and grammar from those sources into our own, so the women suggest him to paraphrase only the main point.   

Just as every coin has two sides, I think citing can lead both advantage and dis advantage. First of all, citing, beside academic, help us build up moral standards for respecting intelligent property. And when the intelligent property gets protect, more people would engage in developing ideas. On the other hand, because of citing, we would probably pay more attention on paraphrase others’ ideas into our own paper rather than develop our own ideas. Thus, creative thinking may be less and less.