Read the following brief excerpt taken from a journal article:
Officials at Western Carolina University designed their year-old mandatory-leave policy after struggling to help students with eating disorders who had refused to seek appropriate treatment. So far administrators have not had to remove a student, but Bill Haggard, the university's associate vice chancellor for student affairs, says the policy gives administrators "leverage to encourage students to get help." "Separating a student from the institution would be a last resort," Mr. Haggard said. "Our first mission would be to do all we could to help the student."
Source: "Dismissed for depression." Eric Hoover. The Chronicle of Higher Education 52.29 (March 24, 2006): 6.
You write the following paraphrase. Have you correctly put the information into your own words?
Paraphrase: In 2005, Western Carolina University set up a “last-resort” policy to cope with students who have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, such as eating disorders, but who won’t try to get medical help. To date, the University has not chosen to suspend or expel any student under this policy (Hoover 6).
What do you think? OK or plagiarism?
Original Passage: Modern-day bloggers trace their antecedents back to Ice Age cave painters and to the political pamphleteers of the early centuries of the print revolution. In U.S. history, their ancestry can be seen in the openly partisan press of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the muckraking journalists of the progressive era and the rambunctious hosts of mid- and late 20th-century talk radio. Now with an inexpensive platform that was available to none of those ancestors, bloggers have a unique ability to disseminate their messages — chatty or substantive, informational or opinionated — in real time, 24/7, to an audience as large and far-flung as a global computer network will allow.
Source: "Are blogs a passing fad or a lasting revolution?" Kenneth Jost and Melissa J. Hipolit. The CQ Researcher, June 9, 2006 Volume 16, Number 22, p. 42.
You paraphrase the source as follows: In a way, blogging is not really a new thing. The Ice Age cave painters and the hosts of talk radio can be seen as bloggers. However, with the use of blogging software, today’s bloggers can disseminate their messages as far as the computer network will allow.
What do you think? OK or plagiarism?
Original Passage: Last week scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany announced they would attempt to sequence the Neanderthal genome--the complete DNA of the closest known relative to modern humans, a species that disappeared from the Earth about 30,000 years ago. …What would they be like? From their skeletons, we know they would be robust and barrel-chested, with a heavy jaw and brow; from their caves it appears they could use primitive tools and buried their dead. But they seem to have lacked modern humans' capacity for abstract thought; although they spread overland through the Middle East and Europe, they apparently never crossed a body of water they couldn't see across. Anthropologists are divided on whether they had language, and although they presumably were able to breed with Homo sapiens, there's no clear evidence they ever did.
Source: "Cavemen, Chimps And Us; What can we learn from Neanderthal genes?" Jerry Adler. Newsweek Vol.148, Iss. 4; pg. 48 July 31, 2006.
Paraphrase: Scientists believe that the Neanderthals looked somewhat different from modern humans. For one thing, they had a heavy jaw and brow. Although they could use primitive tools, they were not able to think abstractly. Some scientists believe that they could use language, while others argue that they could not. Finally, “although they were able to breed with Homo sapiens, there’s no clear evidence that they ever did” (Adler 48).
OK or plagiarism?
Original Passage: For years researchers have debated whether smoking affects the lungs of men and women differently. So far, there's been as much evidence against a sex bias as for one. But that may be starting to change. In the most compelling study on the topic to date, researchers determined that women are twice as vulnerable to lung cancer as men but, in a surprising twist, they die at half the rate of men. …The study showed that both sexes tended to be in their late 60s when they received a lung-cancer diagnosis but that the women usually had smoked considerably less than the men. Still, at each stage of lung cancer, the women lived longer than the men.
Source: "Lung Cancer and the Sexes." Christine Gorman. Time 168.4 (July 24, 2006): p64
Your paraphrase: Until very recently, scientists have not been able to determine whether there is any difference between male and female smokers in terms of which of the sexes are more likely to contract lung cancer. The most recent study has concluded that women are “twice as vulnerable” as their male counterparts (Gorman 64). However, the same study also indicates that the women diagnosed with lung cancer “lived longer than the men” (Gorman 64)
OK or plagiarism?
Original Passage: As the courageous behavior of passengers and crew members who battled the four hijackers on the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001, became public, some families grew troubled that four former athletes who made phone calls from the plane — Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett and Jeremy Glick — received almost all the sunlight of media exposure. Many others aboard were left in shadow. It's not that other victims' families discounted or resented the valor of those men. But the families resisted early attempts by politicians to honor only these four. There was concern that bravery aboard United Airlines Flight 93 not be made into a kind of Olympic sport, where some passengers received a gold medal for gallantry while others had to settle for silver or bronze.
Source: "Paul Greengrass's Filming of Flight 93's Story, Trying to Define Heroics." Jere Longman, April 24, 2006. The New York Times n.p. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/movies/
Your paraphrase: Some of the victims’ families of United Flight 93 resisted the early attempts by American politicians to accentuate the valor shown by four particular passengers, all four of whom were former athletes. These families felt that all members of Flight 93 were equally deserving of honor and that bravery in such a situation is not equivalent to the kind of bravery exhibited in an athletic competition.
OK or plagiarism?