A brief digression on plagiarism

In discussing the extracts in Task 10, the point may be made by students or teachers that plagiarism can involve not simply copying from a source but stealing someone else's ideas and re-expressing them in one's own words without acknowledgement. After all, if one paraphrases source material successfully, as in the summary tasks, can one leave what qne has written unacknowledged?

This should be discouraged; but it may sometimes be difficult to draw the line between what constitutes stealing original ideas and re-cxpressing those which are really common domain. In the first text In Task 10, on 'Vitamins', all the

information could fairly comfortably be considered to be commonly known – the offence is more one of using the original author's words without acknowledgement in extracts 1,3,4 and 6. However, it is sometimes better to be on the safe side -hence, the acknowledgement of paraphrased incorporations (as opposed to quotations) in extracts 7 and 8. This makes the unacknowledged paraphrase in 2 slightly suspect.

In the second text used in Task 10, the observations made by the writer are less obviously common knowledge, even among economists – which might make the example of unacknowledged paraphrase in 4 a little suspect! Other considerations may enter into play here – namely, how specialist the intended readership of a piece of writing is in a specialist Journal: acknowledgement of information that is commonly known in the field may be far less imperative for a post-doctoral researcher than for a student doing an essay on an M.A. or M.Sc. course.

With respect to plagiarising words, a predictable doubt that may be voiced by some students is: 'How many words in succession from the original would be considered plagiarism?' The 'gut feeling' response to this is that asking the question is already indicative of a wrong attitude. For the purposes of the material in this book, and probably as a generál principle too, it is better to appeal to commoh sense than to inculcate rules. Of course, a piece of writing may end up with an instance of five consecutive words in the same continuous sequence as in a source text. It is when there are repeated instances of this and/or similar sentence patterns to the original that work should be rejected.

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the above comments are intended to be of assistance if doubts are raised. The deeper one goes into the issue of plagiarism, the more complex it reveals itself to be. While appreciating that discussion at a more superficial level may fail to produce clear-cut solutions because an underlying complexity exists, we trust that it is possible to appeal to teachers' reasonable judgement both in dealing with the material in this unit and evaluating students' writing in the essay tasks in Units 4 and 5.