self-plagerism?

Question

i wrote a paper in high school about Taoism and now i find myself writing a final for a college class that is similar. is it plagerism to take a paragraph from my old essay (complete with citations, of course), and put it in my new essay?

Answer 1

No. You wrote the original. I'd revise it if I were you though. Just to make sure it says exactly what you want it to say, and so it flows smoothly into your new essay.

Some teachers frown on it because it is seen as lazy. But if it's only a paragraph, I don't see the problem with it.

Answer 2

As I understand it, the reason you are not allowed to submit the same paper to two different professors without the prior permission of both is that you are supposed to be producing a certain amount of work during your college career (so that you can learn from it), and dual submissions undermine that expectation (and decrease the amount that you learn). If the first paper was submitted to Turnitin, or if the professor you submitted it to kept a copy, then your professor this semester might have access to it. I would not submit the same paper again, since you are apparently at a school that forbids double submission. (A few schools don't, but most of the time when I've looked up an academic integrity policy, I've found that whatever school it is does forbid it.) But if you wrote a new paper using the same basic argument, but using new words and using additional sources, and either strengthening or refining the argument, I would expect you to be fine. If you're worried, you could just go to your professor and ask whether you're allowed to write a new paper based on the old paper. But I don't think you need to, so long as it truly is a new paper and not just another version of the old paper. (In my own work, I consider a piece to be a newer version of another piece if I start with the old paper, either on my computer screen or on paper in front of me, or even in my mind as I go, rather than starting clean by asking myself what I have to say about the topic *now*, having learned from the work I did on the older paper and also from new reading and new thinking.) If you want to use the old paper as a resource, you could cite it in exactly the same way you'd cite anything else, according to the style guide your professor has you using. (In fact, if you look at published papers in an academic journals, a lot of them cite older work by the same scholar.) You might write something like, "I have argued elsewhere that P. [Paul 2011, pp. 3-7] In this paper I am going to show that if P, then Q. Since P, therefore Q" Then I would attach a copy of the old paper to the end of your new paper, so that the professor can see what you showed in your earlier work. If I were you, I'd check with the professor before doing this, because your work may not be considered a scholarly source.

Answer 3

Unlikely but possible, yes. There're two ways that re-using your own work might cause you problems: (i) if you take material from one college paper and submit it in another class, and the professor finds out, you might receive an F because you not allowed to submit the same material in more than one class; (ii) if your school used a plagiarism detection site called turnitin.com, you should be aware that that site keeps your work in its database, so if you reuse the work and the new professor submits it to turnitin.com (most colleges have subscriptions that enable professors to do this easily), then it will be returned marked plagiarized.

As a college professor, I haven't failed many students for the latter but I usually wind up failing one or two a year for the former as many students don't realise that they can't do it. So, just for future reference, this is not a good habit to get into, even if you almost certainly won't have a problem this time as you are using a high school paper.

Answer 4

Unless you subscribe to the philosophical notion that since we are essentially different from moment to moment, we are therefore different people, you shouldn't have much trouble in regards to copying your own work unless the previous article is somehow accessible to the marker this time around - if it is, especially so if it has been published somewhere, you should cite all of your previous ideas.

Some people cite themselves all over the place, but that's probably just a marketing tactic.

Answer 5

NO.

You wrote it so there is no need to site yourself.
Now if your 1st paper was published in some form, then you should check the APA website for guidance. Look in the reference citation section.

Answer 6

check your school's honor code.

Generally, in my experiance, the rule breaks down to one grade for one paper. You have already turned this work in for a grade, so resubmitting it for another grade will generally be plagerism.

Answer 7

To plagerise an article, it must be written by someone else. Your writing of the paper on Taosim is yours alone to use as you see fit.

Answer 8

no. you are citing yourself. if you copy texts from an author(other than yourself) it is pagerism. if you cite excerpts from an old essay, thats called downright genius. saves you a hell of a lot of work!