CREATE BIBLIOGRAPHY on RELIABLE SOURCES

[I like that title!]

In step one I discovered and listed the ten unknowns that I picked from the essay after reading the essay from the last paragraph and all the way to the first paragraph and I discovered that there were several concepts that I had missed as I read the essay the first time. The second step took around forty minutes to do a thorough research from credible and reliable sources such as the Earlham College webpage, the Oxford dictionary and Waveland Press. The terms and what I learnt are below;

1. Composers are not necessarily required to indicate whether the themes are originally theirs or not – This is plagiarism since it is required for them to indicate themes that they obtained from other composers. [I’m confused—are there or aren’t they required to mention where the themes come from? And according to whom?]

2. A song inhabiting a demilitarized zone that is between genres – the song showed a part between genres that had not been visited before.

3. Harmonic sequence it is the vocal pattern, which is repeated at lower and higher pitch levels.

4. Lingua franca it is a language adopted as a mutual language between people whose inborn languages are not the same.

5. The phrase that authors are seen as scapegoats in order to expatiate the sins in culture - this meant that authors are being blamed for plagiarism issues that have been there since.

6. Ad hoc – it is arranging or doing something for a certain reason only.

7. “The line between fact and fiction is fuzzier than most people find it convenient to admit.” It is a concept that means that it is hard to tell the difference between fiction and fact.

8. Fabricate – is the process of making things using labor or skill or art.

9. Citing work domesticates it, denudes it, robs it its excitement and flattens it – this is not the case since the work stills belongs to another person and it does not change the original meaning.

10. Mimetic – it means copied or alike.

From the third step, I had some different ideas and noticed some of the objectives of David Shields differently unlike the first time that I read the essay. This was made possible since I had noted the list of concepts and terms I had not understood, through step two I better understood them through the research. The ideas of David Shields, as I read it for the first time, was to shun plagiarism and show the manner plagiarism has occurred over the years and are still being repeated today from the ancient times. After your comments and a careful reading, I realized that David Shields’s objectives were to draw the line of plagiarism and indicate to people what plagiarism is and through this enlighten them that plagiarism is unavoidable in real life (Shields 2013). Also, the essay is more about how we perceive copyright and fair use, and accordingly how we understand originality.

David Shields sees the effort by lawyers to prosecute people caught with plagiarism as a chance to cover their failure to cross the line between facts and fiction [I am very interested in this but also confused], he requires that people to note that plagiarism is a crime but there should be ways to overcome it and with a consideration that in some circumstances it is unavoidable.

The last step was rewriting the representation with a better understanding and extensive research.

Revised representation:

This essay is confusing as it does not draw the line nor further conclude on the difference between fiction and facts, this would thus make it easy to understand originality [Shields seems particularly interested in blurred lines]. Fiction is not something or a situation that has occurred in the real world thus it is an imagination, facts are things that have happened and are real this would be hard for a 100 percent originality as other people saw it and are thinking the same thing (Shields 2013). What frustrated me in this essay is the fact that the work, songs and art produced are not original they are just combinations of what was invented and composed in the past. It is a pity that people are ready to lie even before interviews on how they invented their work despite knowing that it is not their original work [but is it always lying?], it is important for authors, composers to acknowledge the work that does not belong to them and give credit to these innovators. What fascinated me about this article is the fact that David Shields took time to research and discover the close relations between the different ideas and innovations that have been made over the years since the 12th century. I was fascinated by the development in innovations and inventions that have emerged over the years and the fact that they all have certain similarities though not easy to notice.

2. Represent the entire essay. Aim for about one page of writing here.

“I Can’t Stop Thinking through What Other People Are Thinking” by David Shields is an article that focuses on originality in art, music and in writing something that has been hard to tell since the ancient era. Over the years innovations and ideas have been discovered in art, music and in writing and the expectation that they were a hundred percent true and original but this has not been the case. According to Shield's it is okay to have 10 % of ideas extracted from other sources and ninety percent should be original work from the author or artist [is this Shields’s claim or a claim that he is citing] have fair use of copyright but this has not been the case example in the case of HENRY VI out of 6000 lines, 4000 lines were extracted from Holinshed's CHRONICLES this is more than 10%. This clearly shows that there is minimal originality in the art, books and music as time goes and by [is that how Shields would explain it?] the end of the day we will have the same work that has been paraphrased, added on and repeated rather than people coming up with new ideas and thoughts. The music we listen to according to Shields was there in the traditional era the only difference is that it has been adjusted slightly to appear different though it is not.

To avoid been discovered artists, authors and musicians are covering up their actions through lacking to cite their work that is a form of plagiarism and giving false experiences to make it seem like original work. They lie before the public forgetting the fact that people have heard their tunes, heard and read past writing and have seen past artwork and it is not hard to tell the similarities between those in the past and the current work (Shields 2013). A good example is the “Country Blues” by Waters he claimed the song was a song he composed based on an experience he had and Lomax that had heard an earlier recording challenged him and later Waters agreed he had extracted some parts from “Walkin’ Blues” by Robert Johnson. Mimicry therefore is being used as a way to manipulate originality.

Your research allows you to notice and think through more specific details and nuances in Shield’s essay. But I think you are still misreading the text here. Shields does not believe that writers and other artists are lying in the incorporation of other people’s work. Instead, he believes that that incorporation is essential to art, that we find originality not in inventing new things but in combining old things in new ways. With that final example of Muddy Waters and Alan Lomax in your mind, take a look at this related piece by Jonathan Lethem: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/. If you read carefully, you will find a lot of ways that what Lethem is doing further contextualizes and complicates Shield’s essay (and challenges your interpretation of Shields).

Check

References

“There is no such thing as originalty” [!]