plaigiarism

The following is yet another response to a forum assignment:

Review the reading material on plagiarism and then examine one of your recent research papers. Identify the paper you examined and in a one to two paragraph posting, answer the following questions:

1. Did you follow the chapter’s guidelines?
2. Where do you need to improve?
Note: The focus on the forum posts is on quality content, not simply meeting a minimum word requirement.
Be sure to respond to at least two of your peers. Your initial posting is due no later than midnight Thursday and should be 250-300 words; your peer responses are due by Sunday midnight and must be at least 100 words in length and move the conversation forward.

Itā€™s been a while since Iā€™ve written a ā€œtrueā€ research paper; I have, however, written several research driven responses during my schooling hereā€”one of my favorites being about a military incident and possible cover-up.

For an EDMG230 forum response/assignment I had to seek out an example of a military incident and give a critique of how the situation had been handled. I managed to dig up a few articles on a ā€œbroken arrowā€ā€”damaged missileā€”incident that transpired at a Naval base in Washington in 2003. Since this assignment depended upon giving an opinion of the outcome I located a blogger that wrote of the incident in a conspiracy-like fashion; normally this sort of ā€œtrickā€ isnā€™t acceptable for college-level or ā€œprofessionalā€ writingsā€”but, I believed that my audience would accept and enjoy the spin I had planned through the uses of a conspiracy perspective.

In my writing I sourced materials from the Associated Press and the blogger, making every effort to strike a balance in the story I was presenting until I reached the point where I was to critique the incident. I strayed from sourcing further material once my critique of the incident beganā€”I did not want be accused of manipulating any ā€œqualifiedā€ source material in order to support the odd perspective. In the midst of my critique I even placed a separate conspiracy-theory of my own. I chose to place the theory in brackets to designate that the thought was in fact separate and my own since I placed it well ahead of the conclusionā€”in an area which would have been seen as ā€œinappropriateā€ by most scholars.

After reviewing that assignment I did find a mistake that could have been avoided if I had carefully proofread the textā€”an error in citation. In the fourth paragraph I placed a citation following the period of a sentence; I believe that this mistake was made due to the way I writeā€”I ā€œfree-writeā€ all of my work without citations first, and edit them in afterward.

Other than that mistake, I didnā€™t notice any other errors that could be interpreted as plagiarismā€”intentional or otherwise.

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