The following is yet another response to a forum assignment:
Review the reading material on plagiarism and then examine one of your recent research papers. Identify the paper you examined and in a one to two paragraph posting, answer the following questions:
1. Did you follow the chapter's guidelines?
2. Where do you need to improve?
Note: The focus on the forum posts is on quality content, not simply meeting a minimum word requirement.
Be sure to respond to at least two of your peers. Your initial posting is due no later than midnight Thursday and should be 250-300 words; your peer responses are due by Sunday midnight and must be at least 100 words in length and move the conversation forward.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a “true” research paper; I have, however, written several research driven responses during my schooling here—one of my favorites being about a military incident and possible cover-up.
For an EDMG230 forum response/assignment I had to seek out an example of a military incident and give a critique of how the situation had been handled. I managed to dig up a few articles on a “broken arrow”—damaged missile—incident that transpired at a Naval base in Washington in 2003. Since this assignment depended upon giving an opinion of the outcome I located a blogger that wrote of the incident in a conspiracy-like fashion; normally this sort of “trick” isn’t acceptable for college-level or “professional” writings—but, I believed that my audience would accept and enjoy the spin I had planned through the uses of a conspiracy perspective.
In my writing I sourced materials from the Associated Press and the blogger, making every effort to strike a balance in the story I was presenting until I reached the point where I was to critique the incident. I strayed from sourcing further material once my critique of the incident began—I did not want be accused of manipulating any “qualified” source material in order to support the odd perspective. In the midst of my critique I even placed a separate conspiracy-theory of my own. I chose to place the theory in brackets to designate that the thought was in fact separate and my own since I placed it well ahead of the conclusion—in an area which would have been seen as “inappropriate” by most scholars.
After reviewing that assignment I did find a mistake that could have been avoided if I had carefully proofread the text—an error in citation. In the fourth paragraph I placed a citation following the period of a sentence; I believe that this mistake was made due to the way I write—I “free-write” all of my work without citations first, and edit them in afterward.
Other than that mistake, I didn’t notice any other errors that could be interpreted as plagiarism—intentional or otherwise.
Tags: #American Public University, #APUS, #COLL300, #college, #school
[…] “plaigiarism” was originally published on J. Palmer […]