Speech about Plagiarism

Assalamualaikum Wr. Wb. Hello, good afternoon everyone. Let me introduce myself. First, my name is Wahyu Dika Akbar. I am a student of Gunadarma Karawaci University. I study the major of English Literature since 3 years ago. I am so grateful to everyone who lets me talk about important topic. The point of me stand here is to do a speech about plagiarism. We have already heard a lot about it, but do we know as much as we heard about it?

Since we have heard a lot about what plagiarism is, we can simply define it as taking someone’s words, creation, assigments, then we put our name as the creator of them. There are so many definitions of it that we can search on the internet. It doesn’t matter how many definitions we can search and read, but the most important thing Is to never do that.

I want to talk about this because it seems like plagiarism is not an issue that we don’t have to pay attention to. We think it’s ok to do that, really ok. We don’t care about it. Nobody talks so much about it because they don’t have the right to talk about plagiarism if they do it too. I keep asking myself, if we always think plagiarism is normal, when will we stop?

Education about plagiarism is something that we rarely get since we study for so many years. Since elementary school, junior high school, senior high school, even right now in university. If we cheat on someone, our teacher will simply ground us. Whether they are angry, or they give a punishment. They can give us bad grades. Binus University will drop the students out if they cheat on exams, which is a good thing. But, how many times we get education about plagiarism or cheating? How many times we are informed about the types of plagiarism. And how many times we are informed about the impact of plagiarism? Is it really a big problem? Why is it a big problem? And so on.

Some people know that plagiarism is a negative thing. Some people also try to not doing it. If they don’t know so much about it, how could they know if what they do is plagiarism or not? For example, a student has to do an assignment. They have to write a paper with the information about science. They browse the internet to find an information about it. Once they have found it, they start to write it down. They want to stay away from plagiarism, then they read the information and paraphrase it. This story sounds fine, right? We know they didn’t copy the text. They change a little bit of structure and put it into their assignment. So normal. But did you know that paraphrasing is one of the plagiarism types? If you didn’t know, you’ve indirectly plagiarized other people until know. This is why we need to know more about it. Now, you will start to know the other types of plagiarism. I will explain a few types that I read from bowdoin.edu website.

There is also Mosaic Plagiarism. You might be so strange to hear it. When you are lazy to write your own words, sometimes you find an information about a topic in so many sources. I am sure you don’t want to be noticed for copying, that’s why you do this. After you get the informations, you combine all of them and write it down to your paper.

Do you know about self-plagiarism? It sounds really crazy. I know what you are thinking right now. How can we plagiarize ourselves? Yes, this kind of plagiarism exists. After studying for so many years, there are so many papers that we’ve wrote. Sometimes the new assigment in campus can be the same as the one we did in high school. Without the permission of the lecturer or the teacher, we submit the high school assignment to the campus. We have never thought that this is also a type of plagiarism. In fact, it is. This is what we call a self-plagiarism.

The most intolerant type of all is direct plagiarism. It is when we copy someone’s work in a very detail way. Paste it to our assignment without mentioning them who wrote it. We want to do our job quickly, we don’t want to take a lot of time to do it, and we want an instant access to finish it. Why do we do it sometimes? Imagine if the paper that we wrote for so many hours copied by our friend. We did it with effort and they finished it in a few seconds, in a little time. They didn’t need to think so much like we did. Do you think it is a good thing? I don’t think so.

I remember when I was in high school, I got an assigment. The teacher asked me to do a research about the history of Indonesia on the internet. I had to write every details of it, the colonization by Netherland, Japan, and also the independence. I thought I would take a lot of time if I do it by myself. Then, I decided to find some information about it, copy it, and paste it to my Microsoft Word. I spent at least 15 minutes to do this assignment. I did not have to think much, it was so easy.

On the day the assignment was submitted, the teacher asked the students few questions about the history of Indonesia. I heard my friends actively discussed all the things they learned from the internet. All those knowledge sounded interesting. At that time, I realized not only that I was a copycat, but I also skipped the opportunity to join the good discussion with my friends.

I end my speech with a positive notes for all of us that we should do a lot of research about the facts of plagiarism. It is a negative thing that stops us from upgrading our knowledge. One day we will regret doing it. Thank you so much for listening. Sorry for all the mistakes. Assalamualaikum Wr. Wb