Pondering...

I just finished re-organizing the re-write of my feature article for class. I like it a lot better now.

Now I have to start thinking about my group project and how we're going to combine all of our ideas into one kick-ass article. At first I thought, "Wow, this is going to suck. How in the hell are all of our brains supposed to magically work together to punch out a beautiful babe of an article?" Then I thought, "Well, self, it may not be that bad after all. Two (or three, or four) minds are better than one."

So we'll see how that works out. My group has the solutions aspect. And quite frankly, I'm tempted to type out in size 72 bolded font, THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS. Because there aren't. We can pretend that there are solutions. We can tell kids to wake up in class and cite their sources right. We can give them a slap on the wrist and say, "Hey, do you think that you're going to get anywhere in life if all you do is cheat?" But it won't stop it.
It's going to be hard to work back down to a clean slate in the plagiarism bubble.

Erica messaged me and told me she had an interview with Donald McCabe this week. He conducted a study on plagiarism on college campuses a few years ago, and I took a lot of my facts in my article from that study. I think it's awesome that she found him and talked to him. When you see names on a study or an article, sometimes you forget that they're real people--not just words on a screen/piece of paper. That's why interviewing people is so amazing. You get to talk to real people. Why in the world would people ever want to make stuff up like that? Or copy and paste from someone else's interview? It's so much cooler to do it in person.

For example, I was at a press conference last night at the Worcester Police Station to cover the hit and run accident that happened in Worcester last night. I was there with all the other big-shot reporters from the other stations, observing them ask the questions about the accident. Nothing is more exciting than to stand there with actual reporters and get quotes from a police officer about a crime that happened a few hours ago. What was more interesting was going home to watch how each station covered the story. They all put a different twist on it and used their own words, clipped different sound bytes from the press conference, and had different video of the accident.
Where's the fun if only one reporter showed up and all the others took the story from that reporter?
It's much more interesting to get five different accounts of the story and five different angles. You learn more that way.

Ah. I get it now.

We're all investigating plagiarism. But we all have different angles on the story.

We learn more that way.