Plagiarism - causes and effects

What is plagiarism? Plagiarism is a criminal act of stealing other people’s ideas and information. A piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work. The word plagiarize derives from the Latin word “plagiārius”, which means “kidnapper”. The act of plagiarizing is taking someone’s work or ideas as if it were their own. Heavy punishment could be given if a person is caught plagiarising.

Normally general public, mostly students, would need to access in websites to get points and ideas to complete their work and assignment. Sometimes when they are lazy, they take a shortcut by cutting and pasting from the passage or article in the internet. Cut-and-paste method is not wrong but unfortunately, when they cut-and-paste, they sometimes forget to include the author’s name. By the time they realize that, either they might have the police knocking on their door or has been disqualified from the paper. It is actually sad to see these things happening to them

Not only students would plagiarize, but even working people does that. Since today’s technology is so advance, with the internet, various magazines and books that one can refer to, it is actually easy to get all the information that one want to find within a blink of an eye. So, some working people do plagiarize in their presentation as well. Not only in presentation, they might also plagiarize in their work which will then be submitted to their boss, and if coincidently the boss finds it nice, he would post it up and that time the work will be seen by the public. Then a random person would identify the work and eventually will report it to the authorities. At that point of time, when they are questioned, no matter what reasons they give will be unacceptable, as it is still considered as plagiarism.

Although it seems harmless when using another person’s information without him or her knowing and been acknowledged, just take a few seconds to think of that person’s