I'm going back to school

How much is too much to do?  I work full time, am a mom and decided it was time to go back to school.  I set a very aggressive goal to complete the first step of an Associates degree at the local community college and started taking classes over the summer.  This semester I am taking 9 credit hours on top of my other work and life commitments.  I am taking Intro To Cinema, Technical Writing and Principles of Macroeconomics.  In Intro to Cinema, we are reading about the evolution of the film making industry and will be watching and discussing several movies that I am looking forward to seeing the first time, or seeing some again, including Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain and Star Wars: A New Hope.  Macroeconomics is what it is.  It is required for the business degree along with Microeconomics that I hope to take next semester.  For the Technical Writing class, we are working on different types of letters and memos along with creating and maintaining this blog.  Last week we looked at plagiarism, how it happens and what we can do to prevent it.  Plagiarism is passing off another person's thoughts, ideas or work as your own.  There is intentional plagiarism where you are buying a paper, having someone else write a paper for you or copying information directly from the source without citing and giving full, complete credit to the original person or source.  If you are even thinking about this - just do not do it.  It is stealing and fraud.  You are doing everyone a disservice including yourself.  The consequences are not worth it.  Then there is accidental, unintentional where you misuse quotation marks, paraphrase, or not cite the original source properly.  In my professional career, my writing consists of letters to clients, memos to document the client files and emails so plagiarism is not a concern on a regular basis so I had to refresh my mind about how and when to cite my sources.  I think a good rule of thumb is, when in doubt CITE!  So now as I work on these posts, I have another thing to do - I have to remember if I am using anything other than my original thoughts, if I look something up for ideas or reference, to cite and give credit.  This is just one more thing to do, because there is always too much to do.

Resources

https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism

https://www.quetext.com/