According to Tory Young, the most valuable resource to avoiding plagiarism is time[1]. Her opinion here is an interesting one; if you take time to read resources thoroughly and research areas you are particularly unsure of, you should be able to complete the task you have been set. It is also essentially important to read carefully through essays before submitting them, taking time to scrutinise and analyse, ensuring you have completed the task with good evidence of coherence. For some students the amount of time is irrelevant; they simply do not understand the task in hand and, in some cases, resort to plagiarism. Passing someone else’s work off as your own, in my opinion, defeats the object of being at university. Surely you are there because you feel academically able to produce work to a high standard and experience a sense of achievement at the end of your degree? As a new English student, Young observes ‘Finding an acceptable critical voice is difficult (p. 36) and I have to agree. You can sometimes feel that your opinion is incorrect or that you are not in a position to be questioning or criticising pieces of work. She continues…You do have a voice not just to admire a text, but to interrogate why, to ask it questions (p.44). Young here is encouraging the exercise of expressing a critical voice when undertaking an English degree in order to succeed to ones full potential at this level. I think that this something that a student develops over the course of their degree as the confidence in their own critical voice grows.
1. Young, Tory, Studying Literature, A Practical Guide (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008) pp. 36 – 44. Further references to this edition will be given after quotations in the text.
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