The essay of student 1 is clearly guilty of plagiarism. The sentences in the essay were each copied from the sources, pasted and combined to give both perspectives of the effects of watching Mickey Mouse. In order to correct this, there are two ways student 1 can do in order not to plagiarize the two given sources. First, student one can paraphrase the content of the two sources. You are paraphrasing if you are using your own words to explain and point out things that you got from your sources. For example, the first two sentences in student 1’s essay can be rewritten like this: Mickey Mouse is an emblem of the great prestige of America. Despite of being a “rodent”, Mickey Mouse symbolizes America as a great nation with the wealthiest, economically and politically, and having the blithest lifestyle you could ever have in this world. The second way is to directly copy the sentences or paragraphs from article or books and you acknowledge the sources you got those. This essay would have been good because the essay deals about two perspectives of how people see Mickey Mouse. It could have been better with proper acknowledgement of sources and if student 1 paraphrased and use his own opinion to expound further the arguments presented on the sources. In addition, sources should be stated at the end of the essay with correct format.
Student 2’s essay may have no intention of plagiarizing the sources’ articles but how the writer acknowledged the sources was quite inappropriate. With this, student 2 is still guilty of plagiarism because aside from the having the correct format, the way student 2 writes the essay is very ambiguous in terms of knowing until where did he/she copied and which parts are his/her own thoughts. To give credit to an author when copying a large scale of text, one must put the last name of the author inside a parenthesis, the year it was published and the date (e.g. (Souris, 1990, p.109)) after the quoted texts or just name and the year it was published if you’re just copying a few lines. Moreover, at the end of the essay, student 2 must state the full name of the author, what book or article it came from, the year it was published and the publisher. I could not consider this essay scholarly made because it is merely a “copy and paste” compilation of different articles, there was no effort used to explain further and give the student’s idea and perspective about the topic. I suggest that student 2 to should seldom copy the large scale of sentences in his/her sources. Just copy when needed like emphasizing a point that gives more impact if written the way the source did it. Lastly, student 2 should be more attentive in constructing his essay in terms of continuity or connection of sentences and paragraphs. Like if one wants to contrast the perplexity of the allegory of Mickey Mouse to other people, the use of conjunctions would help connect and compare different standpoints of Mickey Mouse giving more life to the essay.
Sources:
http://wanderwilder.blogspot.com/2011/06/plagiarism-exercise-for-comm-2-mth-230.html
http://www4.caes.hku.hk/plagiarism/Source_A.htm
Sources:
http://wanderwilder.blogspot.com/2011/06/plagiarism-exercise-for-comm-2-mth-230.html
http://www4.caes.hku.hk/plagiarism/Source_A.htm
