writing

To: Leslie Patching

From: instructor

Date: 23rd April 2017

Subject: Plagiarism Issues with written and visual digital media

Introduction

Plagiarism is the use of some else’s prior ideas, processes, findings or words and passing it us your own without acknowledging the original author and source. Plagiarism is an ethical issues as it is seen as theft and fraud. Plagiarism is a huge issue facing scientists, professors, students and a number of other professions where intellectual property ownership is vital. Although there are mechanisms in place to monitor plagiarism e.g. use of references and citations, the boundary between references, quotes and copying is unclear. The research purposes to examine the myriad of issues surrounding plagiarism especially in this day and age where it is easy to “copy and paste” other people’s works. It will also examine why plagiarism is a growing trend and how it is being regulated.

Background

Plagiarism isn’t a new problem, historically a number of great literature legends have had their works interrogated for plagiarism for example William Shakespeare, Taylor Coleridge and even Oscar Wilde. -Plagiarism is an ancient art. In modern times however plagiarism is not new and is on a steady rise in all aspects of academic writing, music, art, even plagiarism has be sited in political speeches. In this day nearly every student’s academic paper is filled with plagiarized material. So why has plagiarism increased so much in this day and age?

In ancient times it was difficult to spot the copycats and thieves and punish plagiarists, they didn’t not have reliable repositories that had enough works to which they would have scrutinized through furthermore in those times plagiarism wasn’t recognized in law as there were no patent or copyright laws. Today, plagiarism can be spotted through the use of technology e.g. the internet has provided a great referencing repository. It is however not that simple even with new technology as there are some concepts that are hard to define such as self-plagiarism (where a person publishes a work that has already been published but claims it as his own) furthermore some persons may copy some work and translate into their own writing style so it looks entirely like a new work but it is plagiarized. In the research paper, an investigation into what tools or procedures are available to deal with plagiarism in the current time will be conducted.

Needs assessment

This proposal is to invite interested parties to collaborate in this research in order to help in dealing with plagiarism such as academic institutions and academia e.g. scientists and engineers. Plagiarism is relevant in technical communication since in such kind of communication materials originality and authenticity are vital and hence understanding why it is important to acknowledge other people work in our work is important. . It relates in technical communication since it is about a specialized topic.

Proposed Plan

The primary focus of the research will be on how to identify plagiarism in a publication using modern technology and tools as well as to factors that have contributed to the rise of plagiarism in the current age. Other topics that shall also be incorporated include the emerging issues in plagiarism such as self-plagiarism and what role it plays in ‘evolutionary publication’ .Legal actions or penalties that may be undertaken agent authors found to have plagiarized will also be examined.

The learning objectives expected in the research paper include: the factors encouraging the rise of plagiarism in the modern society, the role technology has played in curbing these vice and the legal standpoint in identifying culpable parties in plagiarism and the accompanying penalization

This will be a basic research as the aims will be broaden the knowledge about plagiarism in writing and visual digital media by bringing information from a number of sources and deriving the links and relationships to understand the issue in-depth.

Limitations

Probable limitation to the research is time, since the aggregation of information from varied sources would take a considerable amount of time, and with the increasing duration that the research takes then the costs of conducting the research will also rise.