| > Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you. Funny enough, this idea is almost certainly one you are plagairising. Perhaps you could find nuance, depth, and understanding by turning those words on themself? Somehow I feel like most of the debate here centers on these words: > The purpose of <foo> is <bar>. That little word "the" there at the beginning seems a bit myopic to me. I mean, clearly, something like writing functions in more ways than one. Here are some other potential purposes of writing, off the top of my head: * Deconstruct your personal ontology, * Intrinsic artistic value, * Emotional expression, * Elucidation of unconscious grammatical habits, * Social signaling. Any of those are perfectly functional operations of the writing act, and a few of them actually benefit by plagiarising (Identifying these is left as an exercise for the reader). Of course, saying that "university should allow students to operate under any possible goal framework" is a different matter, but hopefully that at least points toward one way of thinking with more nuance about plagiarism. |