Plagiarism: Understand and Avoid It!

Here are some passages from scholarly materials.  Write a paraphrase of each one, show it to your instructor, and ask for feedback!

"In the summer of 1900, people thought Galveston, Texas, could weather any storm. When news arrived of a hurricane headed toward them through the Gulf of Mexico, fewer than half the city's 38,000 residents left town. People from Houston even went to Galveston to see the huge waves.  Early on the morning of Sept. 8, 1900, the 'Great Storm' arrived. The water started to rise, the waves grew bigger, and the wind got stronger. When the local U.S. Weather Bureau climatologist, Isaac Cline, began to grasp the danger, he implored people to evacuate Galveston, but it was too late. The hurricane slammed into the island with 150-mph wind. 'The roofs of the houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper,' Cline wrote. By 3 p.m., Galveston Island was submerged. As darkness fell, a 15-foot storm surge rolled over the island. Houses collapsed, and the waves pushed a wall of debris across the land, destroying almost everything in its path" (The great storm, 2008, p. 5).

"The film Brokeback Mountain was adapted to the screen from a short story by Pulitzer prize-winning author E. Annie Proulx. And as the story’s name suggests, the representation of landscape was a foremost concern in the adaptation process. Proulx is a longtime resident of Wyoming, and her descriptions of western American landscapes in the story are both deliberate and personally informed. Specifically, Brokeback Mountain is described as being located within Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountain range; some Wyoming locals have argued that the writer’s inspiration for the story and its location came from hanging out in a famous cowboy watering hole in Sheridan,Wyoming—the Mint Bar— at the foot of the Bighorn mountain range"  (Johnson-Yale, 2011, p. 891).