Academia, schmacademia

Saturday, Jun. 04, 2005 @ 3:31 p.m.

Sometimes I get so sick at how anal-retentive professor are when it comes to citation of sources for papers.

I understand that the main purpose of proper citations and references are to give due credit to the sources where you got the information from. I completely agree that it should be done. Giving credit where it's due is absolutely important, yes, of course. But to get SO nit-picky about quotations can sometimes make you feel like you're not even capable of stringing together a few basic words of the English language on your own.

The case in point: This bitch of a professor that I currently have for an anthropology class. I was writing about a historical monument in India, about when and why it was built. Sure, I got the information off a book, and I referenced it in my "References" page. The sentence in the book was simple: "XXX was built in 1505 by YYY". It's a gawddamn simple sentence. So I wrote in my paper, "In 1505, XXX was built by YYY", followed by the author that I referenced in parenthesis. What did the Bitch Professor do? She accused me of plagiarism!!!! Why? Because I didn't put quotation marks around the "XXX was built" part of the sentence that I allegedly "lifted" from my source.

What, she didn't think that I'm perfectly capable of stringing the words "was built by" together on my own without stealing it from other authors?? It's a damn basic sentence, and that author didn't exactly trademark those words!! WHY couldn't I use those 3 damn words without plagiarising?!!? "It's not enough to simply rearrange the words, this doesn't make it your own", she wrote. What a bitch!!! So if my source uses the word "built", I'm copying it if I use that same word?!? What am I, too dumb to have come up with the usage of a word that was taught to me in kindergarten!?

So yeah, the rules of academia make total intuitive sense to me, but it's just that some pathetic professors who have nothing better to do than to split hairs just love to make a mountain out of a molehill. BITCH.

(Whoops, I used the word 'built' several times in this entry without citing my source. So here it is: KISS-MY-ASS, 2005.)

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Academia, schmacademia