Write the Appropriate Letters to Identify the Author's Purpose and Tone

question 3

Short Answer

Write the appropriate letters to identify the author's purpose and tone.
A Rhode Island College freshman had a paper to write on the topic of homelessness in the United States.He fulfilled the assignment by cutting and pasting passages taken from a web site that listed and answered the most frequently asked questions about the topic. When his plagiarizing was discovered, he claimed to believe that he did not need to cite the sources because no authors were listed next to either the answers or the questions (presumably our young scholar thought the answers had materialized on the page by magic and no human involvement was needed).Another student, this one from DePaul University, got caught plagiarizing because the passages he lifted from the Web all had a different typeface from the few select passages he had written himself.When confronted by his professor, he was not especially embarrassed.He did, however, want to know how to make the type uniform in time for the next paper he needed to "write."  A similar incident occurred at the University of Maryland, where a student lifted passages from Wikipedia for a term paper and when a professor asked her if she realized she had plagiarized, she insisted that was impossible because she had taken the passages from Wikipedia, and the entries were written collectively. These students are just the tip of the iceberg, and the excuses they give are typical of many college students today. But the fact that there are lots of students making the same silly excuses doesn't make them any more legitimate.Using words you yourself did not come up with is stealing the work of others, and it doesn't matter of those words came from the collective mind of a group or the mind of a single individual, those words aren't yours to be presented as your own.
The author's point is as follows:
a.Where student writing is concerned, the Internet has been a disaster with the majority of students cutting and pasting bits and pieces of other people's work and calling it their own.
b.Although the issue has gotten a huge amount of publicity, plagiarism on college campuses is not as serious a problem as the media tries to make it.
c.Today's college students need to clearly understand that using someone else's words and putting their name to those words is plagiarism; it doesn't matter if those words were found in a book or on the Internet.
The author's purpose is:
a.to inform readers about the problem of Internet plagiarism.
b.to persuade readers that cutting and pasting passages from the Internet and putting your name on the result is  highly unethical.
The author's tone is
a.subdued.
b.humorous.
c.outraged
d.emotionally neutral.

---

Definitions:

Retro-

A prefix meaning "backwards" or "behind," used in various contexts including medical terminology to denote location or time.

Backward

Denotes a movement or action directed towards the rear or in reverse.

Ante-

A prefix meaning before or preceding in time or order.

Before

Prior to a certain time or event.