Blog #4- Yakun Li

The OSU online plagiarism tutorial discusses a series of questions and situations in or at the edge of plagiarism. Among those, the first and the last questions are the most impressive for me. The first question is designed to explore the scale of using own work in another work. It has an interesting term called “self-plagiarism”, which means it is not ok and can be taken as an academic misconduct if you recondition your previous paper or something for a new purpose. Another one is about paraphrasing. As I can see from this question, paraphrasing others’ paragraph also can be an issue though I was taught not to copy word by word but to paraphrase.

After going through all the tutorial questions, especially those two I mentioned, I felt confused about the plagiarism again. And also I still doubt whether plagiarism should be judged this strictly, strictly even in a weird way. When I chose the answer for the first question, I thought using my own work was such a normal thing. However, I felt kind of hilarious that the answer said this could be a self-plagiarism. Anyway, I know this is the rule I have to learn and follow though I really can't totally agree with it right now. Another confusing thing is about the paraphrasing. From this English writing class (though I think sometimes it's better to be called plagiarism-teaching class), the important concept I’ve learnt is to paraphrase when using others’ idea. But this question tells me that even paraphrasing is not safe anymore. These confusions are what I’ve learned I guess.