Gerhardt, plagiarizing has become a major issue amongst students due to insufficient knowledge of what constitutes as plagiarism. Coming out of high school, many students have a general grasp of plagiarizing. More attention is put towards how to correctly cite credible sources without fully explaining other forms of plagiarism. Gerhardt writes about a young author, Kaavya Viswanathan, who had plagiarized another author's work unknowingly. This tends to happen due to a student's lack of critically reflecting and assessing information they find online.
Gerhardt's technique is effective because she uses analogies that can be better understood by most people to compare how important it is to understand the complexities of plagiarism. For example, she talks about how in college basketball there is not a short orientation where the rules of the game are learned all at once but instead the players are taught repeatedly about the rules of the game and as student athletes. She believes that the same way basketball coaches teach their players about the rules of the game, teachers should teach their students about what plagiarism really is.
The way copyright laws are written are too complex for young adults to comprehend. Although they are difficult to grasp, every teacher can break down for their students what the law is by doing an outline or a presentation at the beginning of the semester. If this is addressed not just once a semester but throughout periodically, then the student will have a better understanding of what constitutes plagiarism. Schools take plagiarism very seriously by harshly punishing students about the importance of academic honesty and respect. Teaching plagiarism should be taken as seriously as they enforce it and not just by briefly doing it once a semester. One argument that teachers might bring up is that if they focus too much on teaching plagiarism, it would take time out of their curriculum which can go towards other topics that they think will be more helpful in helping students becoming a better writer.
