Plagiarism Risk Quiz: Passage 1
Below is a passage from a scholarly publication and a student's attempt to paraphrase the passage. Please indicate by clicking on the appropriate button whether or not you think the paraphrase has plagiarized the original passage. The result will help you determine whether you risk committing plagiarism while trying to paraphrase a source.
Original
passage below taken from:
I would contend that [Toni] Morrison succeeds in closing the gap [between author/tale-teller and reader/listener] by creating a story that insists upon response from readers. She does that by politely assaulting our acceptance of certain cultural assumptions. Initially, she challenges beliefs about morality, about the absoluteness of good and evil; she has done so in all of her books, but the challenge is more intense in Beloved. Killing a child is certainly antithetical to the basic roots of our society, but Morrison forces us to ask again and again what we might have done under the circumstances (Harris 171).
Paraphrase: As Trudier Harris argues, by presenting situations which complicate our fixed definitions of good and evil, Beloved forces us (the readers) to confront our own ideas about morality. As such, Morrison's novel is an inter-active one, in which reader and story participate together (171).