Plagiarism

This experience pushed me to understand what plagiarism felt like, at least in a extremely blatant sense. I'm sure I'm guilty of multiple accounts of what would be considered plagiarism without knowing it, but this was the first time where I took most of my paper word-for-word without the correct citation (just some obscure articles in an attempt to cover my trail). I did this paper relatively quickly in an attempt to simulate what a blatant plagiarist's experience would be. I was unsuccessful in duping my readers, as one found the majority of my essay on a website.

The interesting part is that he found it on a different website that I did. Hence, I'm curious about how much of the web is blatant plagiarism that we are just unaware of. I believe this was not the only incidence of word-for-word hits to be discovered on different websites without proper citation, which speaks for a vast amount of plagiarism on the web. Perhaps our society doesn't understand why plagiarism stifles creativity, and are just worried about the consequences of getting caught and penalized, as we are in school. With that fear removed on small time internet sites, plagiarism looks that much more attractive for time pressed individuals; it's hard to find someone not strapped for time in our modern society.

Enough rambling...