DK Reading Response

I feel like responding to the reading about plagiarism because in high school our teachers drilled into our heads the fact that it's insanely easy to plagiarize and you may not even realize you've done it. And the fact that I can now be expelled if I made that mistake terrifies me. My roommate and I have both talked about this and posed this hypothetical situation: What if you and someone else who got published actually happened to have the same idea about a topic and wrote them down, not exactly the same, but similar enough, and you turned your paper in? Would that be plagiarism? Even if you had no knowledge of this writer or his work on the topic? The fact that it could be done so accidentally and incur such extreme repercussions scares me and would actually make me really angry. If I was just being dumb and forgot to cite a source, then I'd take the blame. That would have been my fault completely. But, reading this section in the book made me feel a little better by telling me what I can do to prevent plagiarism as best I can. The only thing that I am still a little skeptical about is the whole "common and shared knowledge" thing. This term is left up to interpretation way too much and that could really screw someone over. Something I think most people should know might not be considered so by someone else and if they're grading my work, then I've now plagiarized. So, the entire subject just leads to trouble and personally I think that we need to lessen the punishments for it because it can be so accidental and I don't think people should be expelled from school for a simple mistake.