The punishable perils of plagiarism - Melissa Huseman D'Annunzio

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome to the Department of plagarism investigation the DPI has dealt with numerous complex cases in their effort to bring plagiarist to Justice and to rescue perin texts the first form of plagiarism that the DPI regularly encounters is known as brainchild snatching in honor of the Latin word plagiatus from which plagiarism originates brainchild snatchers sneak up on innocent papers and copy and paste them without citing any sources putting quotation marks around direct quotes or changing a word they've also been known to steal and hold particularly eloquent essays for ransom when brainchild snatchers get together they form a kidnapping ring which involves brainchild snatching from multiple sources some perpetrators have even been known to commit self- plagiarism one of the laziest crimes in the annals of the DPI also known as one-sided collaborators these oddballs snatch up entire texts or small passages that they've written before and present them as brand new material brainchild snatchers and kidnapping rings are easy for the DPI to catch just paste a few passages into a search engine and Bam they're caught red-handed the more covert forms of plagiarism include the wild goose chase technique in which plagiarists create fake authors book titles page numbers or other information in order to cover up plagiarism and the old synonym Switcheroo in which plagiarists utilize the thesaurus as their main weapon by substituting a synonym for nearly every word in the document and leaving the sentence structure in order of the ideas the same plagiarists give legitimate paraphrasing a very bad name shoddy paraphrasing is also a key part of variations on a smoke screen a technique in which multiple passages are paraphrased then pasted together into one the thorniest issue that the DPI deals with is the misconception that you can never be accused of plagiarism if you use quotes and cite your sources this is most certainly not the case because a paper that is made up of Passage upon passage of other people's ideas is known as a holy quotable document this is considered plagiarism since there are no original thoughts in the work similarly passage after passage of two closely paraphrased text from multiple cited sources is also plagiarism of the pervasively paraphrased kind because the ideas still aren't one's own and lastly the technique of revealing W concealing is plagiarism because it involves selective Amnesia regarding one's sources in an attempt to cover up wholly quotable and pervasively paraphrased issues in a text some passages are meticulously documented quoted or paraphrased While others are presented entirely as one's own as you can see the DPI has its handsful tackling all sorts of academic Mischief in Mayhem ranging from the petty to the outrageous given the gravity of these transgressions you might be wondering why you've never heard of the Department of plagiarism investigations victories that's because it doesn't technically exist but people like you and me can be our own DPI agents to fight plagiarism and uphold the values of original thinking we know that the best defense against plagiarism consists of writers who save themselves time worry and effort by taking the far easier Road of just doing the work themselves