Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is considered a common problem in every school, which has become a big issue today. To use another person's idea or a part of their work and pretend that it is your own is plagiarism. In other words, plagiarism is when a person copies something from the Internet, from another's work or steals someone's ideas and tells people that it is their work. Work that can be considered plagiarism includes coping written work, music, spoken text and visual text from any sources.

Plagiarism is not allowed in the school because the school is a place where you learn something. Everybody can copy their assignments from sources like the Internet or from someone else's work. It is very easy to get good marks this way. However, when someone plagiarizes there is no meaning in studying, doing work or learning anything (or even coming to school). You get marks on other's thoughts. This is not a good thing to do because by choosing this way of doing your homework and assignments, you do not learn anything.


I never have plagiarized in any of my classes, so I do not have much experience. I have seen many students doing this and then losing marks for copying or sometimes doing the same assignments again. I know that every teacher knows how well you write something and what kind of words you can use. If you have copied your answers from the Internet, teachers can easily know by reading it because usually Internet sources are written at high English levels and everybody writes in a different way. So, I prefer to work by myself and get marks on what I have written rather than losing marks and making a bad impression on someone.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

My Feelings about Essays

Essays are one of the things that make me feel so nervous when I hear the word. I feel scared at first, but when I starting writing, it is just like you are writing normal paragraphs. I think that writing an essay is not that hard if you follow the structure carefully. I feel scared about writing it because I am afraid of losing my marks as I have in the past. Sometimes, I feel angry because if it is a hard topic then I have to work really hard to get it done and make it longer. Sometimes I also hate essays because they take a long time to write, and after doing that much hard work I don't get good marks on it.

There are some common problems in which I lose my marks. One of my biggest problems is writing grammatically incorrect sentences. I also feel confused on concluding paragraphs. After writing an introductory paragraph, it gives me a little bit of trouble to make a conclusion paragraph in different words. I also have trouble making complicated sentences. I write more simple sentences in my essay, so it doesn’t look as good. My transition sentences are also not that good. I would like to work on those mistakes.