So, as I was leaving my final for my English course my professor hands back my final research essay. I was docked 20% because of "plagiarism," in a sense. I am going to quote verbatim what was written as comment on my paper.
"The only problem with this paper is its complete lack of in-tex or parenthetical citations. You have got lots of interesting info, but you must insert references in the text to say where each fact or idea comes from. Not to do this is equivalent to PLAGARISM, and could result in a FAILED paper."
Yes, he did spell plagiarism wrong. Anyway, is this a fact? Never have I had to do such a thing, except for citing direct quotations, which I did not include. In my mind this statement is like saying "every time you tell anyone anything, ever, you must then refer them to the person, place, or thing, that allowed you to come to this conclusion of fact." I did this paper by reading from 6 books/literary journals (all of which I cited properly in my works cited page) and then, after gathering the facts in my head, sat down and wrote it. It is ridiculous, I went from an A paper to a C paper because of this judgment. Secondly, this "requirement of parenthetical citations" was not stated as requirement in the hand-out given outlining the requirements of the paper.
So, I need to know, is this truly "equivalent to PLAGARISM"? Or is this bullshit, and would I have a valid case in arguing my paper for a re-grading?
Thanks
Posts
God yes it's a fact. If you take an idea or quote or passing thought from anywhere, it has to be cited. Are you in college or high school?
If he didn't provide you with instructions to do this in either the syllabus or the assignment, though, I would send him a polite e-mail explaining the issue, because that is pretty ridiculous.
I did cite it. I had an entire works cited page. Requirement to cite facts directly in the paper, at every instance of stating a fact? That is ridiculous.
edit: he said, in the syllabus "be sure to... include a "Works Cited" page."
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/
You need to be careful. Schools will kick you out for violating their academic honesty policy. Even accidentally.
Thanks guys.
touche...
sorry, APA has been drilled into me.
There are different styles of notation, but yeah mang, thats how its done. The higher and more serious your work gets, the less original thinking you are allowed, while the foundation of your work leading up to those thoughts is pulled together from different sources and cited.
Welcome to the Institutionalization of Thought, dude. Oh hey and it gets worse, not better.
Oh well, I just gotta learn to deal with it, I guess. Thanks for the help guys.
I'd be shocked if they don't follow the same rules there. It is a bit silly to include a works cited page if you didn't actually cite any works. The general rule if it's not common knowledge (and this is very basic common knowledge like water is wet), then you should cite where you're getting the information from.
When you first hear the idea of in-line citations, it sounds like the hardest thing ever, but basically it just comes down to this - if you write something down in your paper that came from somewhere else, cite it. So, if you're doing a paper on bees, you could say "bees are small insects that are typically yellow and black" without citing anything, but if you say "Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently classified by the unranked taxon name Anthophila" then you better cite something because there's no way you just know that off the top of your head.
edit - sorry if this reply took me a while, I had to go look up that bee thing... glad you're figuring it out.