- Oct 2016
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www4.ncsu.edu www4.ncsu.edu
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Legal definitions of authorship
This tenant of teaching Plagiarism Awareness to students in Technical Writing is focused on definition (Visit Harrington p. 48 for concrete discussion of legal definitions). By getting students to be aware of the different perspective of who an "author" means, it creates a different idea of content created and whether you have control over your final product. The largest example of this section to facilitate understanding that the creator of content is not always the author is Writing for Hire. In this case, the material does not belong to any given creator, but rather to the company or product it was created for. To help students frame what the boundaries of plagiarism are, Reyman gives these four considerations (65):
- The purpose and character of the use
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portionused
- The effect on the potential market for the work
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we would do well to initiatedialog among academics and industry professionals thatseeks to increase awareness of the range of activities basedon copying, reusing, and repurposing written materials thatare acceptable and fruitful within particular contexts ac-cording to the norms of particular professional settings.
Research on this topic is only founded and enforced by combining the universes of academia and workforce. This discussion will create more foundation indicators and expectations for reusing work, and would do wonders for removing the stigma attached to reusing work. Ultimately, there should be more interaction and awareness in the academic community about the modern uses of information.
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, that would clarify the definition of plagia-rism rather than labeling all acts of copying as potential“cheating” or “stealing.”
I wonder if the school policies around the country are like those in Georgia, where the code of ethics includes strict plagiarism terms. In our common case, it becomes difficult to clearly and uniformly handle plagiarism for your class. I wonder how much of the confusing and vague plagiarism dialogue is pushed by the governing bodies of the school to enforce a definition that allows a more systematic way of handling students.
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Scenarios
Scenarios help illustrate the grey nature of plagiarism. The brand of plagiarism changes with any given situation, and often mocks the scenarios of many ethical conundrums. Ultimately, it becomes skewed by intent and practice.
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develop a more nuanced understanding of allowablecopying and re-use, as opposed to a focus on policing alltypes of copying as plagiarism.
In order to correctly understand and contribute to the creative community, the discussion of re-use is necessary. There is more to plagiarism beyond reusing material, it encompasses intent, audience, the field's given experience, and consideration of the end product. It could be that using other work is not plagiarism because the end product is unique and original content.
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A division between workplace practices and aca-demic expectations distances our classrooms from theworkplace and presents students with an unclear picture ofwhat is allowable and in what contexts it is allowable.
This conflict is an ever present debate in our public schools: Should we inform students more on real world practices or should we instruct principles that are the rooted theories of the expectation in the real world? Again, we see educational pedagogies, particularly influenced by Pablo Freire, find roots within Technical Writing and training.
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In recent years, the anonymity and ease of access pro-vided by the Internet has made plagiarism very temptingto some students. Students can insert passages of infor-mation found on various websites and pass them off astheir own work.... Because of the nature of tech-commassignments, some students will be tempted to cut andpaste graphics, icons, logos, data sets, and source code(for example, HTML, XHTML, and JavaScript) withoutacknowledging the original creators.
It is important to recognize the timing of this section (2007) and the modern attempts to rectify these issues. Now it is incredibly easy to search for commercially or educationally safe images for presentation and use by simply checking a box on most image searches (i.e google presentation image search). As far as copying and pasting sections into a project to pass as original work, that hasn't worked in years. There are checking sites, which are previously mentioned in this article, as well as the availability of the internet for the reviewers. It's far easier to detect information that is inserted into a project than it is to make your entire project sound the same as copied material without seeming plagarized.
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it allows cutting and pasting of electronic text. Further,“patchwriting” here is as aligned with an ethical offense (cheat-ing), rather than a natural mode of composing
Again, we're revisiting the idea that traditional forms of plagarism are always with unethical intent and outcome. This seems to be the overarching theme of the source materials in this article, which the author argues against.
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nternet for writing has a causal rela-tionship to plagiarism
This is an interesting thought, considering the internet has curated a boom of user-generated content.
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Distinctions between the ethical implications of copy-ing, borrowing, reusing, and repurposing text and plagia-rism in various contexts should be made. Not all copying is“theft”; that is, not all copying of materials is a dishonest orunethical act. Some copying and re-use, instead, reflectcommon composing processes that carry context-specificvalues, such as that which occurs in the workplace.
This conclusion succintly ties up the issues brought up in the previous annotation. There are grey areas that make up reusing information such as intent and purpose. Rhetorically, this is a complcated issue because of the ultimate goal of communicating to an audience. Is there an inherent negative to communicating to your audience with avenues that are already successful?
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When studentscopy a written work and turn it in with the intention ofpresenting the work as an assignment they have writtenalone, the students have behaved unethically.
At this point, the arguement seems to be more about the moral meaning of theft. This particular sentence mentions the inherent understanding that plagarism is unethically intended.
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are the writings of technical communicatorsoriginal or are they stolen goods?
This piece is an important thought process through the reflection of ownership and plagarism outside of the acedemic context because the rules are not always spelled out. The practices of using materials become complicated across fields as citing sources become more difficult with multiple authors and mediums.
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Plagiarism relies on the concepts of authorship andownership of texts, subjects of theoretical and practicalinterest to technical communicators.
When it comes down to who owns material, is it who the material was created for or the original author? Perhaps each party has rights to the material, which complicates the issue of plagarism and content control
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while theconcept of “reusable” text has become commonplace fortechnical communicators in industry settings
This is a major component of understanding the complexities of plagarism in Technicial Writing. Reusability of your material does not mean that you, the author, will be reusing it... It could be completely detached from you in the future, melded into a new piece.
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Cutting, pasting, and re-purposing existing content,including collating information from technical docu-ments and product specifications
Technical writing is more about catering to the clients' needs than the acedemic emphasis of creating unique content. Many of us have experienced this difference in our projects this semester. Many groups are repackaging the information we were already given-- and are even manipulating layouts given to us. In an acedemic setting, this is a pretty clear case of plagarism, but in the technical writing world this is an inevitable way to efficiently do your job.
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he common profes-sional writing practice of single sourcing emphasizes a“team approach” in document development that requires aparadigm shift necessary for the activity. The team ap-proach, Rockley explains, “does not mean that the writersare no longer responsible for ownership of their informa-tion or that they will lose control over the structure of thefinal output,” but rather that the roles of writers will changeas they work in teams to produce core content or informa-tion specific to a particular user or product
Again, this position is experienced through our Service Learning Projects. At first, we all experienced the individual aspect of curating work with our pitch presentation. Now, as we are venturing into the deliverable phase of the project, we are utilizing different members to create well rounded material. This can clearly complicate the ideas of plagarism, as we all are working on the same piece in our portfolios.
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