Fortunately, most examples of plagiarism are not deliberate. Some
students are just unaware of the rules of acknowledgement. Others fail
to organise their work well enough, so that when they come to research
their essays, they take their notes in a rushed and careless manner. As
a result they blend their own ideas with those they take from the texts
they use. They fail to put these ideas into their own words, so that the
paraphrases and summaries that find their way into their essay are not
sufficiently different from the original.
The problem is, as we saw in Chapter 10, that the solution can
be almost as harmful in its impact on a student’s work as plagiarism
itself. In other words, we come to believe that the only way to avoid
plagiarism is to give a reference for every idea not only quoted or para-
phrased, but borrowed in any possible way. This gives us the im-
pression that there is nothing new in education and our role is
just to recycle received opinion. In this way, by demonstrating that
our ideas are not original, we hope to make them invulnerable: as they
have been thought by others, their authority gives our arguments the
protection we cannot. Education, then, appears to be more concerned
withwhatwe think, than with howwe think.
Even so, there are other sources of advice, more tolerant of our own
ideas, and in this we begin to see the depth and complexity of the
problem. The Greats Handbookat Oxford advises students: ‘The exam-
iners are looking for your own ideas and convictions, and you mustn’t
be shy of presenting them as your own: whether you are conscious of
having inherited them from somebody else doesn’t matter one way or
the other.’^2So, where should you draw the line?It’s simply not enough to tell students, as one university does, that
they must use references whenever ‘the knowledge you are expres-
sing is not your own original thought’.^3 This would mean that you are
left giving references for just about all the ideas you will ever use.
You’ve probably used words like ‘gravity’ or ‘ideology’ many times
before, but they are not your original thoughts. Does this mean you
must provide a reference from Newton’s Principia or Marx’s The
German Ideology,respectively, each time you use them? You may know
that the distance from London to Edinburgh is 378 miles or that Jupiter
has 16 moons, but you have never measured or counted them your-
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