About blog plagiarism

The Macmillan English Dictionary defines plagiarism as "the process of taking another person's work, ideas, or words, and using them as if they were your own." The issue of plagiarising is not new to me because I've been told a lot about it since I was in the secondary school. It's something all students need to deal with when writing their final dissertation, or academic papers in general. As far as I'm concerned, the problem of how to avoid plagiarism has always created a lot of troubles. I remember teachers and professors spending hours in giving us advice on how to cope with this problem. But what I've always found most difficult is to put all these precious tips into practice. This is particularly true for those borderline cases in which it's hard to establish whether a piece of writing is plagiarised or not, i.e. paraphrases. I believe that in a fair bit of cases, the cause of plagiarism is not ignorance of the rules, but laziness. I myself know the steps I need to follow when I want to quote what someone else has written or said. But sometimes it's just annoying to spend time in carefully selecting quotations, putting them in quotation marks and adding the source to your references, paying attention not to break the rules that apply to the referencing style you've chosen.

By the way, what should bloggers do in order to avoid falling into the trap of plagiarism? I must admit that I was totally unaware of the problem of blog plagiarism, but the whole thing sounds obvious if you think about it. What bloggers do is writing on topics of their interest; so, even in this case there might be the risk of copying what someone else said or wrote. What is more, plagiarism can occur with images, music and videos too. Then the question is: how can we make sure we publish authentic information on our blogs? In order to find a satisfying answer to this question, I surfed the Net and I found a couple of very good websites, which I bookmarked on Delicious. To put it in a nutshell, as for written information the rule is either to quote or paraphrase, paying attention that what you've paraphrased is not too close to the original! When you quote, it is good to pick up a referencing style and be consistent. But that's not all! What about images and multimedia material in general? Even in this case you always need to quote the source, be it a book, a website, or anything else. Honestly, I completely ignored the risks of violating images' copyright, and I am glad I've discovered a good source where to find pictures without getting in trouble: it's called Flickr! Another way to get rid of the problem is to use our own pictures in our blogs, and protect them with a sort of licence in order to avoid someone else's using them illegaly.

From my Web search I also learned of the existence of some tools to detect plagiarism, such as Dupli Checker or Google. These are useful both to check if you've plagiarised while blogging, but also to find out if someone else has stolen any information from your blog! Thieves...you're warned!

Last but not least, I didn't know that plagiarism is given great importance in the States. American students need to follow a sort of honour code, and if they fail there's a good chance for them to get in serious trouble! That sounds kind of funny to me since in Italy the story is totally different. We all know that plagiarism is considered a crime, but nobody seems to care too much about that, neither teachers nor students! I think it would be good to draw a line and start applying some of the American rules; I'm curious to know what would happen!

Serena