Reflection on Ghostwriting Assignment

I had a fairly hard time doing this assignment because I did my paper on the Miller's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, which is written in Old English. Therefore, I had to rely on my friend's explanations of it and summaries that I could find on the internet. The friend who I did my assignment on is a Legal studies major and this was a paper in English 367, a more advanced class than any English class I have taken, and I noticed a lot of the vocabulary he uses in his papers are ones that I barely know the meaning of. It definitely made me realize that people's styles in writing are fairly easy to notice. It seems like a lot of others attempted to ghostwrite by first writing in their own style, and then trying to change it to make it sound like the other person's work. I did this as well, but found it very difficult to do this because it just didn't seem to sound right to me if I changed it. I think this is because I like my style of writing and how it flows. I think my papers usually flow fairly well even if I don't use difficult vocabulary like my friend and in my opinion, flow is more important. This resulted in a pretty bad job of ghostwriting for my friend and I don't think he would want to use it for his paper. Nevertheless, I feel like I have learned a lot from this assignment and I think I can appreciate the work Ghostwriters do now because this assignment made me realize how hard writing in someone else's voice can actually be and it also made me appreciate my own writing style more.

Plagiarism : When should students be punished?

Reading Howard’s essay on plagiarism and our school’s definition of plagiarism showed just how vague the definition of plagiarism actually is. In her essay, Howard shows how different people have different definitions on plagiarism, some requiring intent as an important prerequisite for it to be called plagiarism and some not. High school teacher Hildegarde Bender identifies five types of plagiarism and yet says that they should all be given F’s. This definitely doesn’t seem fair because this means that someone that intentionally plagiarizes is treated the same as someone who accidently left out a citation. Therefore I think intent should be considered when determining if a student should be punished for plagiarism. If the student left out a citation by accident or because he or she didn’t know the rules, he/she should be informed and educated about the rules rather than punished. What is the point of going to school when we aren’t educated about our mistakes? Punishing the student by giving him a failing grade would be unfair in this case, to say the least. It would be very careless to do so because rather than taking the time and effort to properly educate the student, the instructor or school has instead chosen to punish him.

The Hypocrisy of Ghostwriting

On Wednesday we talked about how ghostwriting is not considered as fraud or plagiarism. I have to say that I wasn’t fully aware of the extent ghostwriting takes place before the discussion in class. It surprises me how many celebrities can have a book ghostwritten and barely acknowledge the ghostwriters and get away with it without any consequences. In fact, it makes no sense to me at all because if a student plagiarizes on a paper, he or she would probably get a zero or maybe even expelled. This is definitely hypocrisy because we are taught that plagiarism is unacceptable, but we see celebrities facing no negative consequences for having ghostwriters.

Invasion of privacy or safety?

On Wednesday we talked about some pros and cons of the advancement of technology. With technological advancements, it has become increasingly easier to keep in touch with friends or relatives. It was brought up in discussion that if social networking services like facebook or myspace didn’t exist, we would probably lose contact with many friends.

Although today’s technology has many benefits like these, I thought it would be worth mentioning a recent article I read which describes the FBI’s plans to create a computer database of people’s physical characteristics including fingerprints and iris scans. The FBI say that if they do this, it will allow them to better identify criminals and terrorists. According to Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, countries that are already using images of palm prints they have collected find 20 percent of their positive matches from prints left at crime scenes.

However, this could be a major privacy invasion because it may allow the government to track people anywhere. Also, according to Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project, there will likely be thousands of cases in which people travelling by airplane will be mistakenly identified as possible terrorists and be thoroughly searched, resulting in unnecessary delays. In addition, the FBI is also planning a service in which an employer can ask the FBI to keep an employee’s fingerprints and let them know if the employee ever breaks the law. I feel that it should be carefully considered whether or not the benefits(safety) outweigh the costs(privacy).

Here's a link to the original article for those of you that are interested:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/fbi.biometrics/index.html?iref=newssearch

What really is originality?

The topic of originality was brought up in our discussion, and that led me to think about what originality really is. I agree with a point that was brought up in class that people’s thoughts and writing is greatly influenced by others so I think that in a way, nothing can be truly original. Human civilization and the invention of writing has allowed us to collect our knowledge and technology and pass them on from generation to generation, culminating into the amazing world that we know today, full of unimaginable technology like television, computers, and automobiles to name just a few. So why should writing be any different? We are taught how to write based on styles that have been passed on and in some sense we are taught how to think as well. Of course, that doesn’t mean that nothing can be original, just that we are given a platform to work on, so we should acknowledge that even a piece of work that is considered original has likely been influenced by other things. That being said, I think that for example, a novel (or any other form of writing) can be thought of as original as long as it shows some creative thought.

That brings up another question. What constitutes plagiarism then? Sometimes it is clear that one plagiarized the work of another. In other cases, it doesn’t seem to be as clear. What if you read someone else’s work a while ago and later write a paper that expresses some of the ideas presented in that person’s work without realizing that you had obtained those “ideas” from that person? What if you were influenced by that writer and your paper did contain some similar ideas but expressed your own ideas as well?