Authorship

After reading this excerpt from Rebecca Moore Howard’s “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty”, I find myself torn between leniency towards plagiarism and keeping the strict penalties in place, but I think I fall on leniency. I agree with Howard’s many attempts to demonstrate the increasing availability of information on the web. This access to papers and journals on a computer makes those “copy” and “paste” buttons all that much closer to a writer’s fingers. So there is no doubt it is getting easier to steal, but there is an extent to which moral issues are the culprits. True, there are individuals that just do not understand citation and how it is all put together, but I would argue that some students that are caught with patch writing intended to do so. They figured it would go unnoticed and their crime unpunished. When they get caught however, who’s to say they don’t just lie about how this came to be. They obviously had the intent to deceive the first time, why wouldn’t they just lie again to save their backsides. I guess this is where the professors find themselves in a tough situation. Who are they to judge a persons intention? Lenient rules allow for this controversy, while a strict no exceptions policy kills any attempt at redemption by the offender. Another interesting thing in Howard’s article is the idea that, we as writers are more of an eclectic assembly of previous ideas. From this, originality is a tough word to define. Where do one’s own ideas start and previous writers stop? What is considered common knowledge and what needs citation? I’m a genetics major and when I started writing papers on various topics, I needed to cite different procedures I explained and listed because I had no idea how they were done and the knowledge was not mine. But after working in a lab for a few semesters now I feel I don’t need to cite those things because I do them everyday. I guess it’s a fine line between yours and other’s knowledge, but better safe than sorry and over cite.