Sampling Project

In class Wednesday we learned how to use fireworks to create our collage, but I think I'm going to use Photoshop because I am more uncomfortable with Photoshop. I think that this project is going to be fun.
Lawrence Lessig brings up interesting points in his book, like: copyright, creativity, piratically, property, lawsuits, and personal stories. The book is very interesting too. Lawrence's book also brings up mixed feeling. To be honest I don't know what to feel sometimes when reading. I'm not sure whether or not I should agree with big corporations or sympathize with the individual. He makes very good points for both sides of the agreement. But I tend to go with the underdog so I usually sympathize for the struggling individual anyways.
I have a funny feeling that my sampling project is going to convey a weird message to the reader after reading Lawrence's book.

Plagerism Reaction

I had fun trying to find out where my fellow students plagiarized. I had a method to sniff out plagiarism. I would read their paper and any place that a sentence seem to be well structured or written then I would look it up on Google.com. Also most plagiarized sentences were longer than student students and in plagiarized instances there were slight changes in vocabulary. Also I noticed that if there was a common word used throughout the paper the word was a word used by its source excessively. Another strategy that I used was to was to type in their thesis onto Google.com, because I figured that if you were to be plagiarizing then there would a good chance that you would have the same or similar thesis. Lastly I combined all the knowledge above and tried to analysis the writing style of each classmate. I found myself to be effective at finding an instance of plagiarism the first time I searched Google.com. It was an interesting experience and I learned a lot from this experience. It's way easier to write your own paper then trying to conceal your writing with someone else voice because I spend more time trying to hide the evidence.

Plagerism

I found plagiarism fun and entertaining; and before writing the paper, I felt that plagiarizing was going to be easy. All you had to do was copy some one's text and then use some synonyms, paraphrase, and hope you did not get caught. Then I made an effort to make plagiarism more interesting, because I remember Scott saying that points were going to be awarded to the best plagiarist. At this is the point I felt excitement, I wanted to challenge my writing abilities and determine if I could manipulate my writing style with some one's writing style to make the paper sound smooth. Also I wanted to challenge my classmates' ability to read, find, and figure out some one's writing style to determine where plagiarism was located, but most important to challenge Scott. This is the part that toke me the most time. I googled most of my sentences and carefully crafted my sentences not to have any word order or structure as the person I was trying to plagiarize, but I did leave some clues so my classmates could find where I plagiarized. This assignment seem more like a challenge and a game to me more than anything else.

Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Leonardo DiCaprio

Just say I thought of the assignment as "Catch Me If You Can" and me starring as Leonardo DiCaprio, and every in the class as the FBI. I didn't feel as though I was doing a bad thing because our intent in the first place was to plagiarize. I did feel guilt when I finally put my name on the paper, but the plagiarism was an entertaining experience and a challenge to our ability to write.

Ghost Writing

The person that I am ghostwriting for is my roommate Lee Xiong. Lee Xiong is my best friend in college and we always talk about life, school, philosophy, and anything that you can think of. I thought that ghostwriting for my best friend would be easy since we share most of our secrets. The paper was written about the independent business that he recently joined. I wanted to learn more about it so I decided it to write about the business so I could get a better understanding of it.

We talked for a couple of hours about his independent business, and discussed what he feels that is most important about the business. Then I went to do the writing after I had read his Philosophy paper. I thought that after reading one of his works I nailed down his structure and his writing style because we were so close. As I was writing the paper, I did not consult Lee, because I felt that he would have the same thought process and style as I did, well that’s what I convey. When I was a third to a half of the way done and I decided to let him read what I had so far he said, “That’s not even like what I would say at all. I wouldn’t put it in this way,” then I was stuck, I could not do anything. I strapped what I had had and started over. I didn’t know what to do, everything that I had was wrong. I found out the hard way that we writing differently. I believe that I am a very structural writer; my writing is more academic and wordy than his. Lee’s writing is different from mines, he doesn’t have long sentences and he has a lot a small paragraphs. This paper was really hard to write, after a while I got back to my writing style but kept his way of thinking of the paper.

Ghost Writing- Ethical or Not

A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, or reports which are officially credited to another person (Wikipedia). Another way to look at ghostwriting is professional plagiarism who is influenced by money and legally sells his skills and ideas to another person. The speaker on Wednesday prose a good question, Whether ghostwriting was ethical or not? And would you ghostwrite for someone else?
I believe that ghostwriting is ethical, and if there was a job opening I would take it. Ghostwriters help articulate a person's ideas and thoughts because that person is incapable or unable to. For example, if a foreign woman needed her medication but could not because she could not write in English, and someone wrote her needs for her then ghostwriting would be doing a good thing. Then a counter example, if a woman who is on crack and dropped out of high school because she lack motivation could not write her medication and someone wrote her needs for her then ghostwriting would be doing a bad thing. There are more example of controversial topics: gun control, atomic bomb, abortion, and etc. These subject (things) aren't at fault but the people who uses these elements are, because each of these elements can be use for good and bad.
Ghostwriting is in essence same as writing, sharing Barthes idea that writing is a neutral element, and then extend that idea to ghostwriting. I think if there were to be any controversy of ghostwriting it should be the intent of that person hiring the ghostwriter and how he/she will use the ghostwriter. Therefore the people hiring the ghostwriter is liable for what the ghostwriter writes because ultimate the employer will be using the text.