“Against Our Will”

Each year in school, for as long as I can remember, we were always told not to plagiarize. We know that is not right to copy exactly what someone else wrote for our own benefit, but many people do it anyway. When I was in high school people would be caught plagiarizing all of the time and wound up getting a zero for the assignment. In college, it a much more serious issue, so most students know that they should not do it. In Rebecca Howard’s article, “Understanding Internet Plagiarism,” she discusses how more people are plagiarizing from the internet, and there is software that can be used to find out the source of where the person got the information from. “In today’s revolution, the Internet is described as the cause of a perceived increase in plagiarism, and plagiarism-detecting services are described as the best solution” (Rebecca Howard). I do agree with Howard when she says that these services are the best solution, but I do not think it’s necessary for every professor to check for plagiarism after every assigment. If grammar or vocabulary looks suspicious in a student’s assignment, then it’s understandable that they teacher should check.
One of my teachers in high school would use this service, and every single thing we wrote, no matter what it was, he would check to see if we were plagiarizing. Even if it was just an in class assignment where no sources were even possible to use. We just thought it was funny but pretty rediculous.
Howard also talks about internet sites where you can pay to have an essay written for you. These websites are so stupid because you do not know where they are getting their information from. Odds are, they are getting it from somwhere and could be plagiarizing. Students need to be able to write a paper and create their own ideas and arguments. The internet has not helped with plagiarism, and I can definitely agree with that. It is nice, however, to have a source right in front of us that has all the information we could ever need about any one topic. Just don’t copy it!