Chapter 7 made some interesting points about plagiarism that I have not thought about. I did not know that Obama took a part of someone else’s speech and used it as his own but I hated the thought of it. I agreed with how angered the author got about the speech and how he mentioned that Obama could have said something before using the part from his friend’s speech such as, “My friend Deval Patrick reminded us that words do matter.” I think it was wrong of Obama to simply put someone else’s words into his own speech even if it was his friend and he gave Obama permission, that’s not okay to do. (p172) I always knew plagiarism was bad but this chapter made me realize just how bad it really is. I always thought all the possible ideas that can be put into a paper are already out there, and although I always cited my papers it felt strange sometimes since there were about twenty other sites with the same information but I would only give credit to the site that I used the information from. When someone that is in college plagiarizes I feel like that person learns absolutely nothing. They didn’t really search, read, and find other information that could potentially be more useful or different than from what they copy and pasted from a site. What is the point of college when they will never learn how to think for themselves, the computer will think for them.

Devillez, Eric R., Thomas P. Dow, Michael S. McGuire, Troy A. Swanson. Why White Rice. Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 2010. Print.