Thursday, February 03, 2022

Plagiarism despite footnotes

I began to wonder if the student's paper, despite the footnotes, contained quotations without quotation marks. Plagiarism software revealed that he was quoting and paraphrasing multiple sentences from footnoted works without distinguishing quotations and paraphrases from each other or from his own ideas. When I pointed this pattern out to the student, he responded that the footnotes made my "accusation" of plagiarism "untenable". For him, as for many, plagiarism is apparently only a matter of active cheating, something that one is "accused" of. But even though what he had done is not as extreme as willfully copying text without credit, such misleading presentation of material from sources is still plagiarism. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 February 2022)


1 comment:

Barbara Ruth Saunders said...

I have an editing client who does this. The trouble seems to be that they don't have a grasp of the concept of ideas as discrete units. They report ideas they like without formulating and articulating new ideas. They'll even plagiarize other people's interpretations of quotes from themselves.