Mason's+Page

Plagiarism has affected the writing of every high school and college student over the past few years with the use of turnitin.com. Where in middle school I could write without worries, when I got to high school it all changed. I worried constantly when I wrote, because even though I did not plagiarize anything, the web site would sometimes tell my teacher that I had plagiarized 40 percent of my paper. My worst experience with plagiarism was for my sophomore research paper. It was a ten-page paper about Russia. Before we really started on the project, my teacher took a whole class period to go over plagiarism. She told us that if we were caught plagiarizing, we would receive a zero on the paper, a referral to the principal, and possibly suspended for up to ten days. I think that this scared most people in the class. Most of us had never been in much trouble before and didn’t want to start now with a paper. We did a lot of the research at school so our teacher knew where all of the information was coming from. We worked once or twice a week in the computer lab, looking up all of the information on sites that had already been approved by the school and teacher. After a couple of weeks of research, we had enough to start on the paper. I had never really written a paper this long before so I had to do a lot of paraphrasing to get enough words to make ten pages. I was very worried about the plagiarism rules, and I really did not want to get suspended. So that diffidently affected my writing style and how long it took me to actually write the paper. Our first write up was a rough draft and you would not get into as much trouble if you plagiarized, so I did not worry quite so much. I still kept in mind that I could get a zero but I did not worry too much about it. When I got the paper back, there were huge highlighted sections of plagiarism, even though I did not plagiarize at all. When I went to talk to her about it she said that turnitin.com had said I was plagiarizing. She took off twenty points and told me to do better on the final draft of the paper. I had also noticed that she had paid more attention to the plagiarizing aspect of the paper instead of actually correcting for error like she was supposed to. This made it a little harder to re-write the paper since I had to do most of the correcting and try to correct the supposedly plagiarized sections. I did finally get it done and there was still a small percent plagiarized, but my teacher let it slide and I ended up with an A. Although I still ended up with an A in the end, writing would be much easier and probably a bit better without sites like turnitin.com.