Trip Gabriel Plagiarism Analysis

Trip Gabriel, a reporter for the New York Times specializing in articles about education and politics, argues in this article, “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” about how creativity and originality is under threat because students prefer to copy content off the internet without acknowledging original sources. The article raises some valid points but glosses over the fact that nothing is ever original: every new idea or thought is inspired by or an improvement over an old idea or thought.
In this article Gabriel asserts that in this day and age a student can go to any website and just copy and paste what they need, but when they do not document the source they have committed plagiarism. Gabriel documents various sources throughout the article such as the different cases that occurred at the Rhode Island University, DePaul University, and University of Maryland. He also pointed that it occurs outside of school environments, too, when he mentioned the bestselling

As a counter argument, Gabriel gives the example of a teenage author whose book was nominated for a fiction prize who lives by the credo, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity” (qtd. in Gabriel 496). This theory did not find many supporters, in fact Sarah Wilensky said it encourages laziness and not creativity. It is not an original work if you are mixing and matching (496) and coming up with new ideas. Gabriel asserts that due to digital technology, plagiarism has undoubtedly become easier and instead of creating their own students head straight for the internet. In the article the author tries to show that many students plagiarize not because they were ignorant but because: it is easy to just copy and paste, and because they are unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing