What Is Staples Criticize Plagiarism?

In his article Staples criticizes plagiarism and how students make their work easier by simply copying ideas from the internet. Therefore, students do not learn properly and lose the ability to think critically and originally. Writing, then, becomes a process of creating a collage with passages from the internet. Although the concern of Staples's statement does not apply for many young students, it is encouraged by an easy access to the internet for students, the difficulties of paraphrasing an already paraphrased idea and the professors' ways of acknowledging students' work. Staples's statement might apply for some young students but not for all. In a classroom or university context, the majority of students is not affected with plagiarism. …show more content…
Whereas in earlier years students were forced to go to libraries and could only gain knowledge from books or other people, they can now simply google on a topic to get key ideas in a few minutes. The advantages of new technologies tempt students to use them and save time instead of thinking on a topic for long and sometimes not even get the same results. In addition, it is hardly possible to put original ideas in a sustained thought these days as this has been already done many times before. The issue is that mostly topics that students have to write on remain the same over the years. Shakespeare's works, for example, are hundreds of years old and have been analyzed numerous times which makes it almost impossible to achieve new findings or paraphrase ideas in a more coherent way. As a consequence, students arrange well-written passages in their work. Finally, professors always insist that students need to prove their arguments and ideas with secondary sources. Hence, students get the impression that they cannot just write down their own thoughts but have to demonstrate that these ideas have already been published by another clever person before them. By having to prove their arguments with secondary literature, even though they did not necessarily need it but came up with their thoughts, students take a shortcut and do not bother to think