We could leave to one side what this quote is trying to express – perhaps something about the dangers of trying to sneakily imitate others – and dig a little deeper. Is it still theft – or, for our purposes, plagiarism – if Picasso inserts the word ‘artists’, Eliot ‘poets’ and Wilde ‘writers’? Many students use exactly this technique of word substitution, or versions of it, to try to evade plagiarism detection or in a genuine effort to make the copied passage ‘their own’.
This chapter will tackle plagiarism head on – not to simply wag a metaphorical finger at you and tell you what you really mustn’t do, but by examining all of the key features involved in making your essay your own. Here you will find not only tips on avoiding plagiarism, but also how you can readily become a proactive researcher in locating sources for your essay, how you can create notes that genuinely empower your essay writing and how you can use those sources to make your essay sparkle. This chapter will support your natural curiosity to find out more about psychology and your sense of satisfaction in doing something well – creating something really worthwhile. Your sense of curiosity and creativity is what really matters, so don’t let stress, anxiety and time pressure blow you off course.
In this chapter you will learn…
What is plagiarism and why it matters
The active-engagement approach to locating and utilising sources
How to search effectively for information
Dynamic note-taking
How to really make it your own
Plagiarism: What it is and why it matters
Before we get into dire warnings about plagiarism, the likelihood of being caught and the consequences when you are, let’s try and get a sharper sense of what it actually is and then we can work out how to find a much better way of drawing on the work of others. Plagiarism is used to refer to instances where someone presents another’s work as being their own. It dates to at least 70 ce when one Roman poet (Martial) became aware that another poet (Fidentinus) seemed to be doing just that. It is interesting to note that concerns about plagiarism have risen as the act of committing it has become easier – and right now it has never been easier. It took 10 seconds to go from writing the previous sentence to finding several online essay writing services. But wait, there’s more: if I have an essay to do on Piaget, I can type the six letters of his name into Google and get, as I did, precisely 32 million pages. I could create not one, but hundreds of essays by assembling sentences, paragraphs and pages that I find online. It’s as if I don’t need to think – I just search and find, copy and paste. I might feel bad about the deception involved in getting someone to write my essay for me or cutting and pasting large sections of text, so I could try a more popular form of plagiarism where I just make minor modifications. Perhaps, if I change a few words it will be more authentically mine and harder to detect – a win–win situation.
The Plagiarism Casebook
Look at the following cases in Tables 2.1–2.3. The cases and names (which are from a random name generator) are fictitious, but the incidents are informed by real events. For each case, consider what the student did, what happened and what, in hindsight, they could – or should – have done.
Table 2.1
Table 2.2
Table 2.3
If this chapter is successful, it will stop you from choosing to outsource your essay, to cut and paste another’s work or to simply make cosmetic changes to someone else’s work. All of these turn a beautiful, human task of creation into an ugly, mechanical chore of simulation. Writing is difficult, joyful and satisfying; copying is easy, shameful and empty. At rock bottom, even if you could ‘get away with it’, plagiarism is pointless. It is pointless in the sense that it sucks point and meaning, learning and growth, out of your work, and your experience of being a student is diminished. The opportunity to really learn and grow – and you will learn and grow by writing – is just too precious to squander in an anxious bid to complete your assignment.
The tragedy is that most people do not set out to cheat. Even the essay-writing services attempt to appease the consciences of their potential customers, suggesting that their service is ‘like having another teacher’ and that students can ‘learn from the essays’ that are written for them. The cut-and-paste passages are often done with the intention to change it, soon. Finally, students often make cosmetic changes to a passage not just to evade detection by plagiarism software, but in a genuine attempt to ‘make it their own’.
Ace your assignment Citation and referencing
Chapter 9 addresses the issues of citing and referencing sources using the formatting guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA) in substantial detail. Here it is worth very briefly touching on some of the implications that these have in regard to plagiarism.
The sources that you draw on in informing your ideas should be cited using the format: Surname (date of publication), for example, Dereckson (2020), within the body of your essay. At the end of your essay, the reference section (arranged alphabetically by surname) should contain the full reference details, enabling your reader to locate that resource (Chapter 9 discusses these issues in more detail).
Where the phrases or sentences are used from a source, these should be given in quotation marks and you should cite the surname, year of publication and page, or pages, from which the quotation was taken (again, Chapter 9 discusses this in more detail).
It is important to realise that citing sources is vitally important throughout your essay, but that doing so doesn’t then license you to give up thinking, letting your essay be carried by extensive (cited) quotations. While there is little of the deception usually associated with plagiarism in essays that do this, they are still over-reliant on the thinking of others. Do take into account immediate guidance from those involved in setting your assignment but, in general, quotes should be used to support your intelligent engagement with the essay, not replace it.
The active-engagement approach to locating and utilising sources
What am I trying to do in my essay?
Before we turn to sources, let’s turn to the essay title itself. Thinking about the essay title will guide us as to the sorts of things we need to do in the essay. This will give us a much better sense as to how we can actively use the sources – as resources – in our essay. If we don’t do this, we are in danger of being too passive, waiting to get a sense of what to write entirely from what we read, and we will never reach anything like our full potential. When we have an essay title we need to Stop, Look and Think.
