Since high school we've been taught to not copy other people's work but I never really knew that plagiarism was an umbrella that covered copying another writer's phrases to another author's ideas. After reading the two articles about plagiarism and what is considered plagiarism it sounds justifiable that it is right to consider the act of taking someone's paragraph and interchanging a few words for others as plagiarism. Attributions and citations are right and only correct so as to give the person you are taking the idea from the credit that he or she deserves, but it seems like what is considered plagiarism is spreading to the point where a person's own self-produced idea could be considered plagiarism if he or she does not know that the idea or concept has already been thought of and written about. Regardless of whether or not plagiarism and the punishments that a person must accept for plagiarism are deserving or undeserving I have learned more about how to avoid being reprimanded for plagiarism by attributing and citing passages or ideas or graphs that are the works of others. Attributions and citations seem like a lot of extra unnecessary work that previous generations did not have to worry as much about, but I guess they're what writers have deemed to be mandatory and needed in order to not offend each other or claim credit for another person's work or ideas.