Plaigarism

According to dictionary.com, Plagiarism is "the wrongful appropriation, closeimitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language,thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work." Since the 18th century, originality has been valued much more then it ever was before. In previous years, people were encouraged to take knowledge from their masters and mimic their work and ideas as closely as possible. However, duplicating someone else's work or using their ideas without citation is in this day in age seen as unethical, lazy and just plain rude. I will not plagiarize in this class, any other class I am taking or in any other aspect of my life. I believe it is wrong to take something from someone that they spent their own time creating from scratch and passing it off as your own. Besides the fact that it is not socially accepted and embarrassing to all parties involved, the real issue that I have with plagiarism is that you are not doing that work justice by saying you wrote it. Writing, just like art, can only truly be explained by the person who made it. Therefore, the person that thought of the concept in the planning stages and then executed it to their best ability is the only one that can present that information to the world. People will have questions, critiques, concerns, comments and many other ways in which they believe that article, or novel or story can become better. If the person that published the work is not the person who wrote it, then in essence that piece of writing is going to be changed and created into something that it was not supposed to be. Only the author, who was part of the writing when it was just an idea and then stayed there until the very last grammar mistake was fixed, can truly edit or take criticism for that piece of work. Every person was made differently at birth and since birth every person has had different and unique experiences that have shaped them. I feel, because of this, that no two people can ever write the same thing or have the same concept in mind for a piece of writing.

Post 1

For this blog post, we were asked to find an interesting ad or picture that we could write our thoughts on. I chose to use one of Daryl Cagle's political cartoons on the new Health Care Reform. This seemed like a good topic to use because it is a relatively new issue and everyone has a different opinion on it. However, the specific political cartoon I chose to talk about does not show my opinion on the new Health Care Bill, or the opinion of anyone else. There are three different figures in my cartoon, an elephant, a donkey and a very sickly looking person. The elephant has a shirt on that says, "The Party of No." The donkey also has a shirt on and it says, "The Party of No Limits." The person in the cartoon is bald, does not have a shirt and has pants on that say, "the people" across the front of them. The pants on the person are much too big because of how skinny and ill the person looks. At the top of the cartoon, written in red bold letters, it says, "The Biggest Loser." I really enjoyed this cartoon because it shows that though some of the leaders in our government do try their best to help the people, many of them have selfish motives. In the end, no matter what political party you affiliate yourself with, everyone is in the same position when talking about how laws and bills with affect us.