Ricky Alvarez, Armando Valadez

Within Plagiarism, Authorship, and the Academic Death Penalty, Rebecca Moore

Howard explores the negative implications of plagiarism in today's social climate, which, despite

negation, can be used as a learning experience. In order to understand plagiarism and its role in

modern education, Howard does not limit plagiarism to solely one definition, rather it is made up

of a wide spectrum of motives and reasoning. Due to this, there should be no single response to

plagiarism, since it can stem from a stance of learning, such as patchwriting. Patchwriting allows

for students to further engage with the text by rewriting it into their own words to better

understand the content. In order for people to truly understand plagiarism, they must understand

how we got there. With the invention of the printing press, plagiarism established itself as a

threat since writing became a form of creating economic revenue. In addition, with technological

advancement becoming the forefront for economic prosperity, competition among authors

became volatile and as a result plagiarism was taken to the next level.

Prior to this, however, writing was formed around imitation, where it was not seen as

solely an individual action, but the culmination of knowledge. However, writers today now seek

to protect their originality and seek recognition, leading them to place policies to protect their

individuality. Yet, it is ironic to define plagiarism solely as the taking of words, when the act

itself has never had one clear definition. With the maturation of Hypertext arose more issues

regarding plagiarism because now work could be used and edited to the extent of it being

unrecognizable from its original form. This spread massive hysteria with writers as their works

were continually added upon, losing the notion of there own originality.
 As a result, all plagiarism, no matter the size, is viewed as academic dishonesty, rather

than the students opportunity for learning. Common knowledge has now become extinct

because everything that writers use as information to establish our points have already been

written by someone else, whether they know it or not. Additionally, the main reasons why

students are caught committing plagiarism is a result of their lack of knowledge regarding

technological conventions and citing or because they just are ignorant towards the topic, so they

are only led to plagiarize.

The prevention of plagiarism can be brought from a place of learning, rather than straight

punishment. Plagiarism should not be viewed only as academic dishonesty, rather they should

focus on the chance for a learning opportunity, as opposed to forcing academic punishment.

Since writing is not solely an individual action, writers are influenced by other sources, the

response to the act of plagiarism should be to recognize the other authors work and how it can

be properly embedded within our own writing. By viewing plagiarism as a way to teach new

learning, universities would be able to build and further advance, rather than diminish, their

students ability to articulate and comprehend the text during the formative years of their

education.