Impressing about Academic Writing

Harvey Mackey said that “You only get one chance to make good first impression, and yours may be in the hand of receptionist”. I was lucky when having an occasion to learn how the academic writing is. I was really impressed by its interesting and distinctive features such as academic words, structure and convention.

The first of all impressions in academic writing is its specific words. Unlike worlds in daily communication, academic writing words require precision and conciseness to express ideas so that the reader could understand exactly meaning. Besides, there are many words having the same meanings, so writers have to choose words that are accurate with every circumstance, emphasize particular ideas or phenomenon derive from the epistemological culture . Another point we should notice is to avoid using pronouns such as I, me and my self to express writer’s opinions in argument because academic writing is objective views.

Another impressed aspect of academic writing is structure.  The overall organization must be clear, formal, coherent and logical. That is various parts are connected to form a unified whole. The topic sentence has obviously presented a main point. In addition to getting successful essays or researches, the points have been set up by disciplines of academic writing so that readers are able to follow easily. Moreover, its language is more complex. It is not only more sophisticated from the grammatical standpoint, but it also utilizes more subordinate and complement clauses as well as more attributive adjectives.

Finally, the prominent feature of academic writing has impressed me the best is academic conventions. Providing a reference list for citing sources of quote or paraphrases in your papers is essential factors to avoid plagiarism. It is a good way to respect their exclusive products and your honesty. The convention of citing source is also crucial because it not only allows readers to identify sources you used, but it also dedicates values and foundation of your information. Besides, using evidences which derive from scholarly sources to support your own points of view will be a great tool to convince the readers. In other words, your research will have more quality and persuade the reader if they were found by knowledge of the scholars.

Academic writing is a great method because of its words, structure and citation conventions. When overcoming these experiences, I was impressed by it a lot. Although it is really difficult to accomplish writing task for first step, it will be a good chance to intensively improve your writing skill. 

Strategies to Avoid Plagiarism

When you write a research paper, you have to come up with your own ideas. Plagiarism is when you use someone else’s ideas and say that they come from you. Even if you didn’t copy the words from the original but you only rephrase them this is plagiarism. It is a huge problem on college campuses. Many people are confused about plagiarism and how to fix it, however if you follow these steps you can avoid it.

The first step is to paraphrase, which is taking information from other works and putting it in your own words. You can do it when you find good information for the research paper by reading the information and put it in your own words. However be careful not to copy everything word for word and don’t copy more than a few words from the original work. Focus on the meaning of the work and find a new way to say it. Paraphrasing is one of the most important ways to avoid plagiarism.

The second step is to cite what you get from outside sources by finding what kind of format you should use, such as APA or MLA. Citing is important because it gives credit to the author. This will help you to avoid plagiarism. Don’t forget to put the name of the person who said it, and the date of the publication. If you have doubt of anything you then cite your sources, but before you do that you need to make sure that you analyze and evaluate your sources.

The third step is you quote what the author says like how it appears. You have to put the page number, and the paragraph number when the information comes from the internet or from something else. This will help further give credit to the author.

Some other ways it can be good is to talk with your instructor, take notes, do an outline, ask for help, check and re-check your work with someone to see if everything is ok, and don’t be afraid to say your opinion.

      In conclusion, be sure that you corrected your research paper carefully to check for plagiarism before you give it to the instructor. If you follow these steps you will avoid plagiarism. Paraphrasing and putting things in your own words is important to avoid plagiarism. The good thing about citing your sources is that you give credit to the author, making it easy for the readers to find where you got the information. The universities can check if you plagiarized or not with a checker software to check the students’ papers. If you plagiarized you can lose your academic degree or your job and it can lead to embarrassment. Thus, it is important to make sure you avoid plagiarism.

 

Similarities and differences between approaches to plagiarism in the U.S. and in my country

What if someone drink liquid, which appears yellow, by considering it as an orange juice? Though s/he might be confused on how it looks like but can’t be confused after drinking it to conclude whether it is an orange juice or not. I believe this resembles plagiarism. By copying the idea of someone cannot feature us enough to present the findings on specific contents. In fact, it directly harms the owner who spends a lot of time for the findings or the result. Plagiarism is the worldwide approach. The only difference is how the government of specific country is standing against plagiarism. In my point of view, this is the only factor that shows the different rates of plagiarism in different countries.

The approaches of plagiarism in Nepal is almost like that in U.S. People stole other’s ideas from articles or books or internet and tries to reflect it as their own in different words or in different structures. But the point to be noted is how much does the government is paying attention to plagiarism. Just making the policies cannot lead the country to stop plagiarism. There must be the implementation of the policies. The only difference between U.S. and Nepal in case of plagiarism is Nepal lacks the implementation of written policies against plagiarism.

In addition to the laziness of people, lack of scientific approaches to support their research also encourages people for plagiarism in context of Nepal. In lack of equipped labs and scientific method experiments in higher education, people feel easy to copy entire methodology as well as conclusion to fulfill their educational priority. That’s why plagiarism seems to be increasing yearly as the number of students increasing for higher studies.

Although plagiarism seems to be increasing, the government is not showing attention to the demerits of it. Not only in the sector of science but also in other educational and media sectors, plagiarism is being easy for many people to present themselves illegally by copying other ideas for their own satisfaction and wants. But the real owner seems to be paralyzed in front of the people. This creates difficult situation for the real owner to fulfill his/her basic needs too instead of getting honor for his/her work.

In conclusion, if Nepal became able to implement the policies strictly to prevent plagiarism as found in U.S., the owner of the idea would not be sale in the crowd of cheaters.

Different Approaches to Plagiarism

Plagiarism basically means copying the idea of another person and use it as your own. Unfortunately this is done every day by a lot of people around the entire world. There are some countries that are very serious at punishing this act and, there are a lot of countries that just dont  focus on puniching them and it is kind of accepted. For example my country. In then next paragraph I am going to explain the differences of punishing between the countries.

First, in the US no work is accepted under any circunstance if it is plagiarism. On the other hand in my country it is very flexible, you can talk with the proffessor and make it valid.

Second, here in the US every project must have citation from where the informaiton is extracted or who say the quote. However, in my country not all the projects must have the citation mandatory. If proffesors want students to quote information or phrases they should tell studetns to do it, if not studetns will not do it.

Third, in college here after doing three times plagiarism you can not stay anymore in the institution. Nevertheless, in Peru the worst thing that can happen to you is that the proffessor do not accept you the Project. For example, in the last president elections in my country, one of the candidates was caught cheeting by using plagiarism in his goberment plan, as a result he did not win the president elections, Nonetheless he was not punished by doing it.

To sum up, the differences and consequences doing plagiarism  between both countries are huge. This sometimes is a big problem because we are not used to be that specific when citating, but here we must be.

Similarities and Differences Between Writing Essays in English and my Language

Essays are an universal method of communicating written information and they exist, in some form, for all languages we could imagine. I've been used to writing in English for the past few years but one of the difficulties I encountered when I first started this task was finding phrases, words and proverbs to make my writing understandable to readers. Spanish is my mother tongue and obviously finding common expressions that hispanic people are familiar with is infinitely easier, the challenge comes when finding ways to translate these common phrases because they either do not exist in another language or they are said in totally different ways. For example, in English we have the expression "Between a rock and a hard place" and in Spanish we say it "Entre la espada y la pared" (translates to: "Between the sword and the wall"). Although both phrases are common in English, Spanish-speakers (at least in Venezuela) have no idea of what "Between a rock and a hard place" means (roughly translated to "Entre una roca y un lugar dificil"), making it a little bit tricky on English learners to know the best way of saying common phrases in this language to make their writing more understandable in contrast to how they would say such expressions in their mother tongue.

This use of proverbs also leads to the use words and context. Words that are directly translated from Spanish to English don't always mean the same thing, and even if they do, chances are they are not used in the same way. For example, the word "vaina" translates to "sheath", however depending on which part of the globe your Spanish comes from, the word can either mean "sheath" or it can have an inappropiate connotation (this word in Venezuela has different meanings depending on the context and social class) which is the reason why it's rarely used in formal writing.

Structure-wise, essays in both English and Spanish are the same, as the standard method to coherently organize ideas is pretty much universal (at least in latin-derived languages), however, the most difficult part is changing the thought-processing between two different languages. Any person who's bilingual (or more than that) has to change the way he/she thinks to transition from one language to the other at the moment of speaking, and similarly, there has to be an adjustment at the time of writing. In my experience, Spanish has more rules regarding accentuation, sentence structure, punctuation and also considering that we have an extra letter in the alphabet ("ñ") leads us to having more words to use. It is fair to say that Spanish is less simple to write than English but for me it's all a matter of changing the language in which I speak to myself in my brain (if that makes any sense whatsoever) to make my writing feel more natural.

Other than the differences explained above, Spanish and English are not that distant when it comes to essay writing, however, a failure to look at these seemingly tiny variations can make this writing transition very difficult to almost impossible. I'm sure that there even more dramatic differences between English and other non-latin-based languages, nevertheless these points of view are written in base of the Spanish spoken in Venezuela from someone who's been familiarizing with American English for the last 5 years while other hispanic people from many parts of the world may have encoutered more differences because of their dialect, pronunciation, culture and various relevant factors.

Similarities and differences between St.Norbert College and universities in my country:

Similarities and differences between St.Norbert College and universities in my country:  

In my country, we don’t have lots of universities, we have what we call “college and lycées“. It doesn’t work the same way and the ages are completely different. There is a lot of similarities and differences between St.Norbert college and universities in my country. For example, one of the similarity would be that both in my country and at St.Norbert, everyone come to study and meet people. But one of the difference would be that in my country, we don’t have students from all over the world. Finally, I would say that sport isn’t really combined with school in France. 

Students usually go to school to study. I know a lot of people who are finishing up their degrees in a different country, but I also know a lot of people who choose to go study abroad because for some reasons it is better. For example you get to meet new people and learn about their cultures. But also, you get to learn all about the classroom style and teaching style and all about their food and drink. And if it is a different language, you get to learn a new language and not everyone on Earth are able to do that. This is one of the difference between St.Norbert and my country. 

In my country, school don’t really have people from all over the world. First because it would be to much work to have people who translate the classes and it would take to much of their time. But also because they maybe don’t want people from other country to come and take place in our buildings or maybe because they do not want to waste their time learning to students who are not resident in France. It is pretty hard to understand because it is a welcoming country but this is a really big difference from St.Norbert college. 

  Finally, sports are not combined with school in my country. At St.Norbert, they have sport in the school and we play for the school. In France, in my country, we need to have clubs outside of the school and we have to practice after school late at night. I like how here at St.Norbert we can both study hard but also play the sport we love and represent the school playing for them. I would say that is the biggest different between my country and St.Norbert. 

      In conclusion, students are all looking for a country and school to student in and see how people live in there places. But in my country especially, student from other countries are not a lot and finally, sport are better at St.Norbert, because it is really combined with school.