The most interesting feature of Isserman’s article was the statement that all people plagiarize. Most “coined expressions” that we use were originally said and/or written by a scholar, writer, or thinker from the past. These sentences and ideas formed into such ubiquitous phrases that they were thrust into the common language without the need to pay tribute to the original author. Plagiarism becomes a problem when individuals do not own their work. When someone rewrites word for word, paragraph for paragraph, and gives no credit to the original creator then fraud is committed. They did to take an existing idea and reconstruct it to form a new concept or statement. The question of the grey area arises; how much original information can be used before it is considered theft. We have to decide what is common knowledge and what needs to be cited or reworked to make the concept our own
Jessica bilikiewicz
