Plagiarism Risk Quiz: History 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, taken from
[Martin Luther King, Jr.] knew from his experience in Montgomery, where
television news was making its earliest inroads, that what he was doing was no
longer merely local, that because of television, for the first time the nation
was converging each evening around 6 or 7 P.M. […]
King was appealing to the national electorate at the expense of the regional power structure, which he considered hostile anyway. He needed some measure of white backlash, and he needed, among other things, proper villains. He wanted ordinary white people to sit in their homes and watch blacks acting with great dignity while Southern officials, moved by the need to preserve a system he hated, assaulted them. As such he was the dramatist of a national morality play; The blacks were in white hats; the whites, much to their surprise, would find themselves in the black hats.
Paraphrase: According to David Halberstam, Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the role television played in affecting the nation's opinion of the Civil Rights Movement. While King put himself in danger by confronting his most hostile opponents, he also understood that doing so would gain the confidence and sympathy of a good number of Americans who saw the confrontations on the news. By making his opponents accost him on national television, King effectively placed these Southern white officials in a national drama, one over which he had enormous control and in which his enemies were forced to play the role of Bad Guys.1
1. The Fifties (New York, 1993), 690-1.