plagiarism

I was there after Rene had her "confrontation" with the "thief".

She was mildly glad that she had gotten it over with. After all, I don't think it was a pleasant experience. Even though she wasn't in the wrong. Still, you don't know how confrontations will turn out to be. Especially if you hardly know the other person.

Halfway through our shopping (what's the opposite of spree?), he called to apologise some more. I wouldn't call him a thief. He was ignorant. Just like how I was, until I learnt what plagiarism was!

This copying business was the rage in campus. Having so many assignments, projects and papers to pass up, and with the internet so readily available... it was just too easy picking up information and pasting onto our documents.

Everyone did it, and no one said anything about it being wrong. Of course, claiming something which is not ours, as ours, is wrong. Most of the time we would quote our references and link the information in footnotes or in the appendix.

One day, or maybe somehow someday, we learnt about this thing called "plagiarism" and we realised that we could be sued for what we have been doing all these while. But since I'm the smart one (LOL!) I made sure I edited those sentences until they bore no semblance to the original articles. That won't be called plagiarism, would it? :D

No wonder I took forever to do my final year project thesis.