Plagiarism tutorial--from Duke University Avoiding Plagiarsim powerpoint

Guidelines for Acknowledging Sources & Avoiding Plagiarism

Part 1: Acknowledging Sources : The Shape of Academic Writing Part 2: Plagiarism Defined Part 3: Five Forms of Plagiarism Part 4: A Test of Your Knowledge about Plagiarism and Using Sources

Part 1: Acknowledging Sources: The Shape of Academic Writing

Our Knowledge is Acquired through Interactions with Others

Though parts of an individual's knowledge are gained experientially, the majority of one's knowledge is acquired through interactions with other persons. We may gain our knowledge by reading other persons' work, by entering into conversations with them, by listening to others speak, or by watching them perform actions. Rarely do thoughts and ideas develop completely within a single mind.

Instead, we form concepts, analyses, and interpretations within networks of conversations, ongoing debates, extended discussions, and other interactions we have with others. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that much of our mental lives are spent in imagined conversation with others, so thoroughly do we depend on the social medium of language to carry both internal and verbalized thinking forward. Our everyday speech, for instance, is peppered with phrases such as "I heard that. . ." or "They claim that. . ." so much so that the sources of such information are typically taken for granted, and a concern for who exactly said what often disappears. Academic writing also embraces this "conversational" form, but unlike the practice of everyday speech, all language, information, and ideas not the writer's own are scrupulously attributed to their original sources. As one writer concisely puts this:

Knowledge never stands alone. It builds upon and plays against the previous knowledge of previous knowers and reports, whom scholars call "sources." These are not, in a scholarly paper, the source of your particular argument (you are), but rather persons or documents that help you arrive at your argument. They are sources of information that you interpret; of ideas that you support, criticize, or develop; of vivid language that you quote and analyze. (Gordon Harvey, Harvard University Expository Writing Program)

It has become commonplace to envision the verbal and written exchanges and communications between speakers and listeners, readers and writers, researchers and their sources, as interactions constituting communities of discourse. Discourse communities share interpretive, analytic, and argumentative conventions. Academic discourse communities (often, but not always, shaped as "disciplines" or "fields of inquiry") agree to refer scrupulously to one another's writings and research findings by placing borrowed terms and phrases in quotation marks, and by explicitly linking quoted materials to the name or names of the person or persons who uttered or wrote them. Such a practice makes the constitution of the community visible, as those named in the works cited or bibliography are, in effect, honored as members contributing to an ongoing discussion or argument about issues of mutual interest.

So that the thinking and findings of the persons whose work you choose to use in your writing may be documented consistently and completely, and so that the audience reading your work may recognize various material as not your own, academic disciplines have set ground rules for how you should acknowledge the use of others' language, material, and findings. These conventions for documentation are found in style manuals compiled by academic organizations, which regularly update their documentation conventions (especially as electronic technologies such as the Internet call for more varied forms of attribution). In classes at Duke, you will no doubt encounter various style manuals used in a variety of disciplines across the University, among these: The Chicago Manual of Style, The Modern Language Association Style Manual (MLA), The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Scientific Style and Format: The Council of Biology Editors Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (CBE). Your instructor will specify which style manual to use in preparing papers for specific courses across the curriculum. Style manuals are sold in the bookstore and are often available online.

Quotations from Sources Shape a "Written Conversation"

It is essential, then, to understand the ways in which academic writing is "populated" by persons and their quoted materials and sayings. By referring to the quoted words of others, writers both trace out and enter into conversations and deliberations that have preceded the writer's own entry into the discussion. As an academic writer, one of your chief purposes is to determine how, when, and why a number of different writers' and researchers' statements and findings can be placed within your document so that they may best advance your claim, argument, or analysis. As you determine from whom you wish to quote, which quotations to bring into your text, exactly how much of a given quotation to deploy, and a strategy for placing these quotes within the developing context of paper, you will, in effect, be weaving the fabric of a new dialogue that you have orchestrated among thinkers. Notice how the practice of citing sources in conjunction with one another (sometimes called the art of intertextuality) gives shape and purpose to the following example of scholarly writing, taken from Herbert W. Simon's essay, "The Rhetoric of Inquiry as an Intellectual Movement":

Broadly speaking, virtually all scholarly discourse is rhetorical in the sense that issues need tube named and framed, facts interpreted, and conclusions justified; furthermore, in adapting arguments to ends, audiences, and circumstances, the writer (or speaker) must adopt a persona, choose a style, and make judicious use of what Kenneth Burke has called the "resources of ambiguity" in language. That the style of a scholarly article may be influential in a given case need not invalidate its logic, and may even enhance it. In fact, argues Geertz, "The strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk abut it without fuss," stems from a confusion, traceable to Plato, "of the fictional with the false - making things out with making things up." Once we recognize that. . .texts are made, "and made to persuade," says Geertz, "those who make them have rather more to answer for." Similarly, McCloskey? has argued that so-called objectivity in his own field of economics "is exaggerated and, what is more, overrated."

Successfully negotiating the difficult terrain of this passage is somewhat like moving through a labyrinth of texts, quotations, and voices (the author's juxtaposed to Kenneth Burke's, Clifford Geertz's, and even - in the distance - Plato's). Threading a way through this maze is tricky. The quotations (and therefore the ideas and analyses that stand behind each of the various writer's words) are so deeply embedded in the writer's own prose that without appropriate attribution it would difficult - if not impossible - to disentangle the ideas found in the sources from the work of the writer. Many instances of academic writing are so intensely intertextual that the need to connect quotations and ideas to the persons who forwarded them is all the more pressing. But with these responsibilities come freedoms: Simon can cross generations of thinkers in order to bring an early twentieth-century rhetorician, a contemporary anthropologist, a modern economist, and an ancient philosopher "together" to contribute to a single line of inquiry. Their virtual conversation is now made available on the page.

The Conventions of Source Documentation

As mentioned, one of your chief responsibilities as an academic writer lies in creating and sustaining the "virtual conversation" you orchestrate among a number of thinkers and researchers as the juxtaposition of one and another's material unfolds in your text. Identifying quoted materials with their authors and setting them in a purposeful relationship to one another in the body of your writing is an important and powerful convention of academic writing. Crediting sources lends credence to your research as it sustains the authority of those who are quoted. Moreover, it lends structure to the overall form of academic writing, which depends upon your soliciting "outside sources" to establish your authority as a careful reader and academic writer.

It is important to recognize that the mandate to document sources fairly and accurately is a conventional practice that distinguishes academic writing from other forms of writing, where source documentation is not required. Presidential candidates, for instance, deliver speeches that have been wholly composed by hired speech writers (called "ghost writers"), and the American public abides by this convention, rarely wondering who the author of a political speech may be. Various journalistic writers operate on the assumption that events are being reported through the language of an "objective reporter," so much so that we sometimes read news stories as if the words they contain simply arrived on the page, beyond the agency of a particular writer. The conventions of journalists do not generally apply to the academic community, whose character in large part depends upon the explicit recognition of the members' research findings, insights, and ideas. In academic writing, however, the outside sources whose words enter your discourse must, in academic writing, be credited to their source.

Part 2: Plagiarism Defined

Academic communities, then, demand that writers be credited for their work and that the source of their material clearly be acknowledged. Not to do so is to plagiarize, to intentionally or unintentionally appropriate the ideas, language, key terms, or findings of another without sufficient acknowledgment that such material is not one's own. As the Modern Language Association Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing defines this transgression:

Scholarly authors generously acknowledge their debts to predecessors by carefully giving credit to each source. Whenever you draw on another's work, you must specify what you borrowed whether facts, opinions, or quotations and where you borrowed it from. Using another person's ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source constitutes plagiarism [emphasis added]. Derived from the Latin word plagiarius ("kidnapper"), plagiarism refers to a form of intellectual theft that has been defined as "the false assumptions of authorship

the wrongful act of taking the product of another person's mind, and presenting it as one's own (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality [New York: Harper, 1952] 2). In short, to plagiarize is to give the impression that you wrote or thought something that you in fact borrowed from someone, and to do so is a violation of professional ethics. (Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. 2 nd ed, New York: MLA, 1998: 151)

Plagiarism encompasses a range of errors and violations. Though the charge of plagiarism can be leveled against writers who incorrectly or neglect to cite quoted material, it most often tempts students who find themselves in the dire straits of having to complete a written assignment without previously having undertaken the laborious (and time-consuming) process of research, reading, note-taking, interpretation, and analysis. Wholesale copying from sources is an easy way to "fill up the page" and to turn something - anything - in on time. In all cases, it is far better to contact one's instructor and directly discuss with him or her a strategy for completing an assignment rather than to risk humiliation and judicial recrimination. Instructors will, within reason and to the best of their abilities, help you to get your papers started, and help you to make progress with your work. You will do yourself and your instructor justice if you openly and squarely discuss the circumstances of your progress or lack thereof.

On occasion, students accused of plagiarism have claimed that their plagiarism has occurred without their knowledge or intent. Since ignorance of convention is not a reasonable defense, it is best to become thoroughly acquainted with the conventions of source attribution and proper documentation used within a particular discipline. Some students seem to believe that there are different degrees of plagiarism, some not as bad as others.

However, no distinctions regarding degree of seriousness are made between any of the following acts. Each constitutes a transgression of the Duke University Honor Code, and all constitute violations of the Duke University Judicial Code, which explicitly defines plagiarism as the "Expropriation of words, phrases, or ideas of another without attribution for the benefit of one who engages in the act of expropriation" (Bulletin of Duke University: Information and Regulations, 44). You will be charged with plagiarism if you:

• Copy from published sources without adequate documentation.
• Purchase a pre-written paper (either by mail or electronically).
• Let someone else write a paper for you.
• Pay someone else to write a paper for you.
• Submit as your own someone else's unpublished work, either with or without permission.
• If the final work you submit - all of it - is not yours, it does not matter how you came by it. If you use another person's work to further your own understanding of a subject, you must give that person credit.

The following materials are designed to help acquaint you with some frequently encountered distinctions between the acceptable use of others' material, and the unacceptable usage called plagiarism. If a situation arises in your own work not covered below, you should ask your instructor for help before turning in your work. You must understand the definitions articulated and distinctions made in the following pages so that you do not plagiarize out of ignorance of the concept's workings

Part 3: Five Forms of Plagiarism

The following three passages each address - in their own ways - issues surrounding the social function of advertising. Following these passages are various examples of writing which plagiarizes one or more of the sources, each mistreating the source in a different way. Please read through the passages, then go on to examine the five varieties of plagiarism that follow.

Three Sources on the Social Function of Advertising

A.

The imagery of elite culture is an ongoing aspect of style. A magazine advertisement for Benson & Hedges "Deluxe Ultra Lights" places two large gold-edged packages of cigarettes in front of a sweeping staircase, draped in muted tones of ivory and pink. Halfway up the stairs a woman in a beaded evening gown, dragging a white mink stole up the thickly carpeted stairs, has her cigarette lit by an elegant gent in a black tuxedo. Meanwhile, in another ad in the same magazine, an unseen hand pours Chivas Regal scotch into a sparkling crystal slipper. Each image reeks of money, offering the consumer a democratic promise of limitless possibility, while, at the same time, projecting the sheltered prerogatives of an elite few - assuming the iconography or "attitude" of elites may, for some, represent a change for the better, an elevation of status. More and more, however, style offers other visions of change drawn from an endless repository of images. Ewen, Stuart. All-Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1988: 14.

B.

TV ads may be read as signs of the times. They may be collected and assembled as pages of a book or snapshots in an album. Each page or photo is read against the social context. In this discourse, ads have themes, themes which mirror the needs or fantasies of social groups in historic eras and therefore map the contours of everyday life. If Virginia Slims cigarettes announce to women "You've come a long way, baby," while a super-chic model puffs away in a state of nonchalant abandon, then the contradictions of the 1970s are reconciled; a woman can participate in the undoing of patriarchy while remaining a very feminine boy toy. In this ready, the ad reveals the social tensions of the age while offering a resolution of them. The TV ad is interpreted as a social document, a thematics of everyday life. Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990: 50.

C.

Advertisements saturate our social lives. We participate, daily, in deciphering advertising images and messages. Our ability to recognize and decipher the advertising images that confront us depends on our photographic literacy and our familiarity with the social logic of advertising and consumerism. Yet, because ads are so pervasive and our reading of them so routine, we tend to take for granted the deep social assumptions embedded in advertisements. There is a great deal more at stake in reading ads than simply wondering whether or not to buy. Advertisements have soiocultural consequences and repercussions that go beyond the corporate bottom line, even though it is the bottom line which motivates and shapes the ads. This critical reading of ads seeks to excavate the social assumptions that are conventionally made (and glossed over) in the split second that it takes us to decipher an ad and move on to the next. Reading ads in terms of social knowledge necessary to their interpretation enables us to isolate and detail the ideological codes that animate the ads. Suspending the taken-for-granted attitude that accompanies the reading process can turn the reading of ads from depoliticized diversion into a political act. Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. New York: Routledge, 1992:2.

Various Misuses of the Three Sources

1. Word-for-word plagiarism

Most college students are already aware that materials taken directly from a source must be enclosed within quotation marks. It is equally important that the author and page number of the source be properly cited within the writer's text.

Unacceptable (Plagiarized) Use of Source:

Advertisers use many strategies to get us to buy their products. Most of these play to our conscious or unconscious desires and fears. Therefore, it is important to examine ads in terms of the social knowledge necessary to their interpretation, a practice which allows one to isolate and detail the ideological codes that animate the ads. In this way, we can discover hidden aspects of our culture and its assumptions.

Analysis of the Plagiarized Passage:

Notice that the second sentence is almost entirely the same as the second to the last sentence in Goldman's text. The added introduction, the omission of Goldman's beginning words, and the substitution of a few words here and there does not change the fact that this sentence essentially was lifted from the original source. It cannot be considered a paraphrase. There must be quotation marks placed around the words taken from Goldman, and appropriate citation must be given.

Acceptable Use of the Source:

Advertisers use many strategies to get us to buy their products. Most of these play to our conscious and unconscious desires and fears. Robert Goldman argues that we must examine ads "in terms of the social knowledge necessary to their interpretation" and thereby "isolate and detail the ideological codes that animate them" (2). In other words, when we look at an ad we must ask ourselves, "What knowledge, beliefs, values, and desires must a person possess for the ad to be understood and to be persuasive?" It is only by way of such thorough scrutiny that we can begin to recognize the aspects of our society that give the ads their powerful meanings.

2. Mosaic

It is equally unacceptable to embed key words and apt phrases taken from a source into your own writing without differentiating them from your own language, forming a "mosaic" of words - both your own and another's. You must call specific attention to the special terms and key phrases you import into your text, fully accrediting their source.

Unacceptable (Plagiarized) Use of the Sources:

Advertisements provide one means of understanding the nature of our culture; they are signs of the time. Most of us are aware of the ways in which advertisers play on our desires. Few of us are unfamiliar with the social logic of advertising, but at the same time, ads are so pervasive in our lives that we may tend to take for granted the deep social assumptions they serve to reinforce. By looking more carefully at advertisements, we may discover the social tensions of the age as well as the hidden grounds of agreement.

Analysis of the Plagiarized Passage:

The writer of this passage has copied several key terms and phrases from both Goldman's and Poster's writings. To avoid the charge of plagiarism, these must be surrounded with quotation marks, and the sources from which they are taken must be cited, even when the writer's own prose makes up the majority of the passage as well as the construction of each sentence. Also, it is important for the writer to be careful in choosing which terms and phrases are actually worth excerpting, and then demonstrating their significance in the context of his or her own argument or analysis at hand.

Acceptable Use of the Sources:

Advertisements provide one means of understanding the nature of our culture. They provide us with a glimpse into the desire we often keep hidden from others - and even ourselves. Most of us have some awareness of the ways in which advertisers play on our desires, something Robert Goldman so aptly terms "the social logic of advertising" (2). At the same time, ads pervade our lives to such an extent that their influence on our lives cannot be ignored. Goldman suggests that we need to discover "the deep social assumptions" through which advertisements gain their power and force. By looking more carefully at advertisements, we may uncover not only the nature of those assumptions (which have become transparent in their very familiarity), but we may also discover that these assumptions are not always the same. Examining ads can also reveal what Mark Poster calls "the social tensions of the age," a concept that gains its utility precisely because of advertising's multiple layers.

3. Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is an important skill to master. It gives writers the power to represent another's argument in language particularly suited to the style and rhetorical demands of the present occasion of writing. To avoid difficulties, it is best to paraphrase with clear purposes in mind: How might representing the writer's argument in my own language enhance my own work? What will be the gains - or losses - of the use of paraphrase rather than direct quotation? How can I insure that my translation of the original language into other words won't dilute or mutate the original meaning and power of the passage?

Unacceptable (Plagiarized) Use of the Sources:

Advertisements have become an unavoidable part of our lives. We encounter them everywhere: on the radio, on billboards, in our mail, even on T-shirts. Our ability to interpret them depends on how well we can read images and how well acquainted we are with the strategies of advertisers.

Analysis of the Plagiarized Passage:

Here the writer has substituted her own words for the words of Goldman, with no apparent purpose other than either to avoid too much direct quoting, or to avoid the responsibility to make her own argument, using Goldman as evidence to support her claim.

Acceptable Use of the Sources:

Advertisements have become an unavoidable part of our lives. We encounter them everywhere: on the radio, on billboards, in the mail, even on T-shirts. Most of us are aware enough of advertising strategies to recognize a scam when we see one: "Lose 30 pounds in 30 days for 30 dollars!" But how good are we at reading the more subtle messages of advertising? Robert Goldman argues that understanding ads is dependent upon our ability to interpret the visual images they present and upon our knowledge of the strategies of advertisers and the motivation of consumers (2).

4. Summary of a Single Source

Like paraphrase, summary is an important technique to control. There will be times when you will need quickly to present the essence of an argument in language that condenses and compresses the original language, but to do so with minimal loss of meaning and intent. Whereas paraphrases aim to represent the original source in roughly the same number of words as the original passage, summaries are distinguished by their compression of the original passage into much briefer terms. Summaries, like paraphrases, must be given accurate source attribution - something that is easy to forget, given that no direct quoting is involved.

Misuse (Plagiarism) of the Original Source:

Advertising displays the conflicting desires of our culture: wealth paired with democracy; the equality of women represented alongside their sexual objectification. Ads represent the politics and desires of the society which produced them. But, we must also study the ways in which we, as consumers, read ads in order to discover what knowledge, beliefs, and ideologies we share as a society that allows us to understand them.

Analysis of the Plagiarized Passage:

By reducing the complexity of the source's arguments to their bare bones commonalities, the writer has not only collapsed important and subtle distinctions found in the various sources' specific language, but also has lost the force of their arguments - a power found in their careful distinctions and subtle differentiations. The writer also has missed the opportunity to demonstrate her knowledge of the field, and to situate her own argument within the body of scholarly work she is examining.

Acceptable Use of the Sources:

While many individuals recognize that ads can be seen to represent the desires of our society, few recognize the way in which careful examination of the desire to which individual ads appeal can reveal the conflicting political desires of our age. Several scholars of mass communications have, however, explored just this area. Stuart Ewen, in his book All Consuming Images, demonstrates how the portrayal of wealth in certain ads conceals the tension between desires for both a democratic and an elite society (14). Mark Poster provides a more extensive analysis of how "ads reveal the social tensions of the age" in The Mode of Information, where he argues that the true power of advertising is its seeming ability to offer some sort of resolution to those tensions (50).

A potential problem emerges in both Poster's and Ewen's suggestion that we can somehow step outside our place in the web of conflicting desires, politics, and ideologies to understand advertisements' hidden agendas. As a possible correction to this difficulty, Robert Goldman argues that the critical site to examine the ads does not reside in the advertisement itself, but rather in our understanding of it, "the social assumptions that are conventionally made (and glossed over) in the split second it takes us to decipher an ad" (2). As ads gain their meanings through the act of their interpretation - an action that involves the complicity of the viewer as well as the representations found in the ads themselves - Goldman's perspective seems most logical, given that ads are steeped in social messages and meanings.

5. Misrepresenting Source Material

In addition to plagiarism (the appropriation of others' texts without giving proper acknowledgment of their source), there is another misuse of source material - more subtle, but equally as problematic. In taking a quotation from its original context, it is possible to misrepresent the original meaning, purpose, or spirit of the quotation. Typically, we refer to this as representing a quoted passage or phrase out of context, and thereby distorting its original intention to fit the present occasion of writing. Writers must be careful to embed quotations in the context of their own writing in such a way that the meaning, purpose, of spirit of the original is clearly apparent.

Here is a passage from a work on American politics which includes a quotation from a speech by John F. Kennedy. The example that follows demonstrates a typical problem you might encounter in using this material in a paper:

The Original Passage from the Source:

Perhaps the unending struggle between government's attempts to protect society by controlling information and the libertarian's efforts to protect society from government is best illustrated by a speech delivered by President Kennedy in 1961. Addressing the American Newspaper Publishers Association, he said: This deadly challenge [the Cold War] imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern to the press and to the President - two requirements that seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer first to the need for greater public information; and second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

Misrepresentation/Misuse of Original Source:

The history of our republic is replete with attempts on the part of the government to silence or to place severe limits on the press, and thus to control the public's free access to vital information. This age-old enmity is perfectly illustrated by remarks President Kennedy made to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, when he invoked a condition of crisis to justify a call "for greater official secrecy."

Analysis of the Misrepresentation/Misuse:

The writer has used Kennedy's exact words, but has failed to reflect the full meaning of his statement. Kennedy carefully affirms not only the special interest of national security, but also the public's right to know - something that readers could not discern, given the writer's representation of Kennedy's intention. The writer has misrepresented Kennedy's original meaning.

6. Another Taboo: Invented Sources

Plagiarism is the name given to the use of others' material without proper acknowledgment. Fraud is the name given to the invention of sources that do not exist. Most students realize that creating false bibliographic references is a serious breach of academic ethics. Many, however, do not realize that listing sources that exist, but were never consulted by the writer, is also a breach of the mutual trust between readers and writers. Do not write "The critics agree. . ." when you have read the work of only one or two critics. Do not list in your Works Cited five books on your subject matter that you have found listed in the online catalog, but could not find the time either to locate or to consult.

Part 4. A Test of Your Knowledge About Using Sources

Duke University uses the following test to assess your knowledge of plagiarism and source documentation. After you have completed the following exercise, your Writing 20 instructor will comment upon your work and return it to you. After he or she is satisfied that you have understand the conventions for using source materials in your work, you will be asked to sign a statement that you "have read and understood the conventions regarding source citation and plagiarism." This statement will be kept on file throughout your undergraduate career at Duke.

The following excerpts are taken from four separate books which explore the influence of print media on the public. Read them carefully, then complete the exercise that follow. (Note: You need not agree with the sources).

Four Texts Addressing the Influence of Print Media on the Public

A.

Meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by nature a very serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985:50.

B.

Ever since the Nazis had begun to persecute the Jews, the American press had felt compelled to offer explanations of the events to its readers. It continued to do so even as the news of massacres and deportations reached the west. This inclination to find a rational explanation was so compelling that at times the press accepted information released by the Nazis - designed to camouflage the Final Solution - at face value. Deportation, the Nazis announced and the press reported, were necessary in order to provide homes for "bombed out Aryans." The denial of the right of Jews to emigrate was explained by the Nazis and the press as due to the Reich's labor shortage. On certain occasions when the Nazis made their intentions clear, the press refused to accept the implications of what was being said because it seemed too fantastic to believe. When Goebbels announced that the "Jews had started the war" and would "pay for every dead soldier," the Chicago Tribune responded by explaining that the deportations and persecutions were "nothing but" a means of giving Germans who had lost fathers and sons in Russia "a means to witness the spectacle of a few unfortunate people whose sufferings make their own seem bearable in comparison." American newspaper readers were told that Jews were being deported to the Ukraine to serve in work battalions and to help with the harvesting of crops. Lipstadt, Deborah. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986: 176.

C.

The positive side to the misrepresentations of African Americas in the media is that they spur more and more Americans to be critical of what we see and read. For example, a 1993 article in Newsweek about a brutal multi-suspect Houston murder was accompanied by a stereotypic picture of a menacing, scowling black man. In a subsequent issue, reader wrote in: "Since five of the six defendants in the Houston rape/murder case were Hispanic, why did your accompanying photo picture only the African American defendant? That doesn't seem to give a very representative portrait." At the 1993 National Association of Black Journalists convention, actor Tim Reid put the need for monitoring media coverage in succinct terms: "If you don't react, then shut up!" he said. In fact, millions of Americans are deeply concerned that the media's failings are helping to drive the races apart. A 1994 Gallup pool found that over 40 percent of blacks and whites felt that the news coverage worsened American race relations. (Smaller numbers of Asians and Hispanics felt the same way). Only 21 percent of whites and 19 percent of blacks felt news coverage helped improve race relations. Refusing to talk about racial issues, particularly in the media, will not change things for the better. Chideya, Farai. Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African-Americans. New York: Plume, 1995: 251.

D.

Objectivity is a term journalists began using in the twentieth century to express their commitment not only to impartiality but to reflecting the world as it is, without bias or distortion of any sort. . . . [However,] no one who proposes to communicate facts about an event will be able to treat those those facts entirely dispassionately and evenhandedly - as if they were objects. A bias of sorts appears the moment the flow of life is broken down into discrete "events," those events in turn broken down into discrete "facts," and a few of the infinite number of possible facts singled out as sufficiently compelling to be newsworthy. Additional subjective distinctions inevitably are injected with each new attempt to narrow the focus or impose organization. Journalists, in other words, do not simply "mirror" the world for their audiences. . . .Journalists' supposed objectivity is further compromised by the narrative frameworks they impose on their stories - their decision, for example, on which combination of formulas a particular crime might be made to fit: woeful victim ("his life savings"), noble victim ("a former Boy Scout"), tearful relatives ("their only child"), despicable criminal ("despite the victim's pleas"), psychologically scarred criminal ("abandoned by his parents"), shocked acquaintances ("seemed such a quiet boy"), or the breakdown of societal values ("the fourth such crime this month"). Most provide sufficient facts to support a multiplicity of possible formulas; journalists choose among them. Stephens, Mitchell. A History of the News: From the Drum to the Satellite. New York: Penguin, 1988: 264.

An Exercise on Plagiarism

Please complete the exercises below, using MLA citation form when quoting from, paraphrasing, or summarizing the sources.

• Write a paragraph in which you incorporate a significant quote from one of the passages excerpted above.
• Write a paragraph in which you make use of selected key terms or apt phrases chosen from the passages excerpted above. Use the paraphrase to help you make a point in your paragraph.
• Write a paragraph in which it would be more appropriate to paraphrase rather than to quote directly from one of the passages excerpted above. Use the paraphrase to help you make a point in your paragraph.
• Write a paragraph in which you accurately summarize one of the passages excerpted above to enrich the analysis or clarify the point you are trying to make in your own paragraph.
• Write one or two paragraphs in which you accurately summarize at least three of the passages excerpted above in order to contextualize your own argument.

After you have successfully completed these exercises, you will be asked to sign the following statement: "I have read and understood the materials regarding source documentation and plagiarism."

This statement will be kept on file throughout your Duke career.

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