Spencer Tolson

Enlarging Experience

As I am a young freshman in college, there are many things I do not know or comprehend about the world. I just do not have the same experience in life that other people do. My scope of understanding is limited. That is why writing is such a beautiful thing. Writing can enlarge that scope to anything or anytime. People long dead can still portray their ideas to people hundreds of years in the future. A BYU student in the 21^st century can read and understand what philosophers believed hundreds of years ago. This is a service that writers have provided for us. We have out our fingertips thousands of years of experience, wisdom, and knowledge. To gain our own ideas, our own thoughts, and our own writing out in the world, all we have to do is read and write. Therefore, we owe it to those writers of times past to take what they worked on and produced to understand and comprehend fully. Only then can we provide our own insight into the matter, and move our process of thinking to levels it has never seen before. This is why avoiding plagiarism is so vital to the writing process. If we just copy what others have worked on and claim it as our own, it is the same as throwing all they have worked for back in their faces. This is worse than many crimes for which people serve jail time. It makes the hard work put into a piece we are reading useless. Therefore, as a writer, it is required- and essential- that I give credit where credit is due. As a reader, I expect writers to give their own personal ideas. These ideas can be based off of others ideas, but I expect to know who did the thinking and work for it first. I expect to be told the truth, and expect to have my mind opened to things I have not considered. Otherwise, why would anyone read? For reading is just a tool in the shed of learning. A very important tool. Plagiarizing and lying about your work is making that tool useless to many. These ethics of writing have been in place since the first symbol scratched on a cave wall. Writing is a way of connecting with others. Plagiarism destroys the very foundation that writing is built upon. We have to be careful not to be the destroyer, but the builder. We can add to the many layers of writing by submitting our own ideas. That is what makes good reading.