Activity 3: Plagiarism

Dear Mr. Hebert,
I would just like to say thank you in advance for taking extra time to review my essay and put in the effort to explain why you think that specific passage is an example of plagiarism, but with all due respect, I am going to have to disagree with you and here’s why.
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary plagiarize means “To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source”. Now I understand how it might seem like I copied the information from “A Handbook to Literature” into my essay, but it isn’t at all. There are multiple ways to avoid plagiarism as stated in one of the handouts you gave us at the beginning of the year like “record all sources when making notes”, “document all quotations” and many others. But the one that I have always used is “use your own words as much as possible when making notes”. This specific strategy is called Paraphrasing. According to Oxford’s online dictionary, paraphrasing means to “Express the meaning of (something written or spoken) using different words, especially to achieve greater clarity”. The passage that we are talking about in my essay is a very clear and acceptable example of paraphrasing because I have taken what C.Hugh Holman has said in his book – which was in more complicated phrasing – and have used my own words and ideas to rephrase it into something more understandable and of my literary level. For