Sunday, September 5, 2010

Paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism

I wholeheartedly agree with the part of the plagiarism article that talks about how difficult it can be for non-native and native English speakers to come up with acceptable paraphrases. I believe this to be especially true for individuals that do not particularly enjoy writing. Often I find myself wondering if I have changed the sentence around enough that it can now be considered something new and it is usually at those times I opt to use quotes instead.


For writers that are using English as their L2, I surmise that the process could be all the more challenging. But I do think that it could be a way to help them develop or further their language skills. It could potentially force them to think more in English and that would boost their cognitive skills.

3 comments:

  1. Hi William, how are you doing? I hope Nonsan is treating you well. The strawberries have passed but the fall should be nice.
    I like your comments about plagarism. It is hard for non-native speakers of English to have original ideas.
    See you in class.
    Cheers,
    Chad

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  2. Hello William :) How are you today? Today is Friday. Oh~ I'm so happy today HAHAHA
    I agree with your opinion. Paraphrasing is one way to avoid plagiarism, also quotation is on method. Do you know quitation methods? If you choose dome opinions on your paper, we can write like this. " " (name, year) Like this methods, we will learn about academic writing class maybe. I want to know one more ways to avoid plagiarism. Have a nice day and weekend :)

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  3. we'll talk more in class, but the weird thing about how we teach paraphrase is that it is not the way that we actually write "paraphrases" in academic writing. an academic paraphrase is really a synthesis of several writers rather than a strict paraphrase of a single writer . . . most of the time if we wish to paraphrase a section from a single author, we just quote it. in a few cases we do make a summary of a concept from an author (that the author covers in several pages) and cite that, too.

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