Conglomerate

Additionally, it might be common knowledge if you think the information you're presenting is something your readers will already know, or something that a person could easily find in general reference sources. But when in doubt, cite; if the citation turns out to be unnecessary, your teacher or editor will tell you.

Dana Lynn Driscoll.

Previously, my definition of plagiarism was distorted. To begin, my understanding of plagiarism was too broad. My belief was that anything I knew was common knowledge; ignoring whether my audience knew the information. Thus quotes or paraphrases that I did not expect to be detected by Rowan and others were highlighted as plagiarism, as shown in my comment paper. Many topics included, “The Marshal Plan…..” (without quotes). It was knowledge that I had already known. I didn’t consider my audience and should have cited this as paraphrasing. However, I seem to want to have my knowledge and facts unquoted without citations because then it becomes obvious that someone would easily catch it. Additionally, my audience did not detect any of the plagiarism that I intended to hide from people. For instance, I quoted phrases from famous US presidents such as, “Ich bin ein Berliner” by Ronal Reagan. Obviously this is a quote by Kennedy; however, I thought that others would understand this is not quoted and recognize this as plagiarism; giving credit intentionally to the wrong person. This was not the case as it occurred many times throughout my paper and people just assumed that it was quoted and plagiarism was not applicable here. Perhaps, to constitute it as plagiarism, I could have cited these quotes with outlandish websites or books. Moreover, I inserted many well known phrases in the paper. One instance when I was writing my paper I integrated a phrase by OJ when he said, “The globe does not fit” (without quotes). To be very sly, I intentionally took his quote and used it in my paper. I would argue that this is plagiarism. I also put such famous quotes like “I have a dream” (without quotes) hoping others would catch it and mark it as plagiarized when I was just using it within the context of the sentence. I failed to consider my audience and thus devastated my chances as being the best plagiarizer.
For these reasons, I named my paper “Conglomerate”. I tried to present a different idea of plagiarism to throw people off in catching my mistakes. It worked. I did fail to forget that knowledge already known by me was perhaps not understood by my audience and it could be argued that giving credit to the wrong person is not plagiarism. Perhaps if I was presenting this to historians or international relations professors, many facts or ideas about the past that I used would not have to be quoted. As of right now, I have a much better understanding the common knowledge rules of plagiarism and have shied away from believing that attributing others work to other people is constituted as plagiarism. My understanding of what constitutes common knowledge is concrete. I now believe plagiarism only to be stealing somebody else’s idea and claiming it as your own. The writers of UW-Madison policies directly focused the definition of plagiarism on this only topic. However, am I correct in constituting plagiarism as attributing work towards others, and should common knowledge about history not needing citation even if it is not know by the reader? How would one judge the intelligence of our audience on a subject?