Blog 6

I come from China, so my first language is Chinese, one of the most beautiful and hardest languages in the world. In my high school, I major studied two kinds of writing; narrative writing and argumentative writing. The difficult thing is when you writing an argumentative writing, you need find a power example or a famous person’s words to prove your issue and it is hard to find a suitable proof and illuminate it. If you can not find a good example, your argumentation will be overthrown easily. While, in some aspects, those are similar with writing in English, but most are different. In some argumentative writings or summary articles, you can not use other people’s words or some sources straightly or without acknowledgement. That would be a plagiarism! Furthermore, I think I need more practice about words. I always use the same word in an article and make it very humdrum. The most useful lesson I learned is use descriptive words and informative words to summary an article. It is very important in a summary.

In my opinion, students should pay attention to plagiarism and academic misconduct because it is very significant for people when they writing article. I confused with citing other people’s words and paraphrase. In China, people do summary or writing an argumentative writing, they can use some of the author’s words or use some proofs straightly. But it is plagiarism at here. I think culture plays a very important role. In “Cheating Across Cultures”, written by Elizabeth Redden, describes the reason why International students plagiarism and I think that because different cultures have different rules. If there are no culture differences, the international students would not plagiarism in their articles. Meanwhile, different teaching style and language barriers also can cause students cheating, so that’s why I think culture plays an important role.