Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati

        “It wasn’t me, was it?” Plagiarism and the Web is an academic article written by Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati that deals with plagiarism and how the internet has facilitated plagiarizing for students. This article was started off of observations from both authors. These observations were of their very own students and the work they had turned in to be graded. After noticing that many of the students had plagiarized, the authors then wanted to know why the student had come to such dishonesty. As a result they found that many students did not know how to cite their sources, others did not know what to write about based on their topic, and others were just lazy. When a student is not interested in a topic or has no idea what to write about based on a topic many tend to plagiarize by “patch writing” or “kidnapping”. Patch writing as the author states “allows student a place to borrow from text, manipulate it, and work through new concepts by piecing their writing with the original work” and kidnapping is “borrowing, weaving writing as impersonation-writing as experimentation, as mimic.” (DeVoss & Rosati, p.194, 2002) Even though both of these strategies are good to come up with new ideas, it is still plagiarism when you do not cite your source even if a whole sentence was not used, you are still borrowing. Many students are placed in a state of confusion when a teacher asks them to write and original idea with plenty of sources that can back up their new idea, which often leads them to plagiarize. The reason for that is that many students do not understand what is expected of them or simply think: “How can I come up with a NEW idea if there has to be evidence out there that supports my idea?”This will just lead the student to try and get ideas from some other place and try to present it as his or her own which is plagiarizing. When researching many students don’t like putting much time or effort into their research, most students, as the author puts it think that research “was going to Yahoo…doing a simple search, and using the first 10 or 20 hits.” (DeVoss & Rosati, p.194, 2002) By doing so many students end up plagiarizing, because they either don’t have enough evidence or ideas to write what is expected of them or if they do they just simply don’t want to spend time writing and use the “copy” and “paste” function to finish their work. In conclusion the authors suggest that students should view any written piece of work as “intellectual property”. If a student starts thinking like the author suggest it will be less of a chance that he or she will plagiarize, because they will now see the written work as property and stealing someone’s property is not a good thing. This is something that I can agree with, because I’ve been in many situations like the ones above and this will be very handy to me whenever I have to write any paper from now on.