Читать книгу How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays - Paul Dickerson - Страница 52

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.