credit due

This week we had a discussion over citations.  I’m sure that one might expect that my response would be negative, that I would advocate information as a universal tool.  Well I do but citation is different from availability.  Citing the information you use to support what you are saying is important for so many reasons.  First and foremost the author of the original work put effort into what he/she wrote.  If you use what they have already written then you are stealing their work if you don’t cite it.  Second the citation increases the value of your argument.  The readers can then go and check up on your sources to see if they are legitimate. My freshman year of college a girl in my freshman English class was accused of plagiarism.  She confided in me that she had not written her paper her boyfriend had.  It was obvious to me that she had plagiarized because she had turned in work that wasn’t her own, but because it was our first paper I doubted the teacher knew that so I looked at it for her.  She or her boyfriend in this case had used statistics in her/his paper without citing them.  I told her that was probably what the problem was.  I don’t know how it all turned out for her but I do know that after that I was put off by her.  It is really upsetting to have worked hard on something and learn that someone else put little effort into his/ her work.