Hmm..."To be or not to be"...sounds familiar

I am not exactly sure why some people want to plagiarize. Having never experienced the process myself (at least…not intentionally. I do not think I have done it unitentionally either) I am not sure why someone would want to. It could be that the student thinks an assignment is simply too overwhelming or too big for them to handle and so cop out with a plagiarized paper. Or they could have the intent of just sounding smarter than they are? I really do not know. Another reason could actually be that they are not sure how to correctly write a good paper and so rely on what others have written to voice their own thoughts. I know that this can happen a lot with earlier students. A lot of the time when I am tutoring papers in the DELC or English 1010 papers I notice that a lot of the actual information in the paper is quotes and paraphrases, with a summary or short agreement surrounding the quote. I have read papers that even have entire paragraphs that are just quote and nothing else. In this case, plagiarism may be more of a mistake than a purposeful attempt to not do their own work.
This kind of reminds me of what Michelle and Michael were talking about all last year when it came to plagiarism…I think they were talking about something to do with plagiarism being a good idea actually…I can’t remember why. Michael tried to explain it to me once but after about 5 minutes or so of a lot of big words I sort of tuned out a little. Whoops.
Anyway, I am assuming that we are supposed to take from this that plagiarism is bad. Obviously. And now I keep thinking of Howlers…which naturally leads to Harry Potter! Hooray Harry Potter! I was incredibly depressed once I finished the last book. Of course there is still the last movie to look foraward two (which they are apparently going to split into two parts. Which is understandable because I cannot see how they could leave anything in that book out. I am really not looking forward to seeing Fred dying, though. I nearly cried when I got to that part in the book. I mean, George losing his ear was bad enough, but Fred dying! The horror!), but I am not looking forward to the empty feeling of utter dejection once all the movies are done with also. I am assuming I will move on…just as long as I do not rebound again with the Twilight series. That was just downright painful (beautifully mockable as the first movie is, I would rather watch a documentary on the growth patterns of legumes.). If anything I will probably schedule a few movie marathons to revel in the Harry Potter gloriousness. Or simply opt for a Lord of the Rings marathon again (even though my eyeballs were burning, it was still totally worth it.).
Anyway, talk about a major tangent! Plagiarism is a no-no. Don’t do it….