Originality in Writing
Some people suggest that it is impossible to come up with an original idea. In some ways, this idea may seem true. After all, art focuses on evoking human emotion, and human emotions, while tremendously varied, are limited to the scope of human experience. While there is a wide range of human experience and human emotion, the permutations and combinations of those experiences and emotions is limited. Even non-artistic innovations are rarely entirely new innovations, but building blocks that have come from combining previously existing technologies in a new way. This makes it clear that the notion that the notion of originality is limited if one believes that, to be original, something must be completely new. Originality is not impossible. However, there is very little room for complete innovation left since ideas have been circulating for a long time. Instead, I believe that people have a wrong understanding of what originality really is. In people's understanding originality occurs only when someone comes up with a completely new idea. My understanding is different from other people's understanding, as I believe that originality is creating a new perspective on an old idea. When one considers what has traditionally been considered great and innovative art, one sees that my idea of originality resonates with the artistic community.
Oddly enough, the concerns about originality and creativity have received so much attention because of a relatively recent innovation- the internet. Prior to the internet, people were not able to access the sheer volume of information in the short periods of time that they...
Therefore, concerns about unoriginality were far more limited to smaller numbers of sources, with which one could expect to be familiar during the course of one's daily life. Furthermore, while it is far easier to commit outright plagiarism, it is also easier to detect plagiarism. Using any of the tools that professors commonly used to detect plagiarism, one can see what percentage of a work or prior works is "original" or unoriginal material. However, there is, at least currently, no way to determine whether the way in which those works has been used is innovative. Instead, it simply gives a percentage of how much of the work is derived from other works.
Depending on how exacting one intends to be about the idea of originality, there is no possibility for one to be considered original. For example many plagiari-sm detectors exclude commonly used phrases and word combinations from their systems, but many sentences are nothing more than combinations of these commonly used phrases. Instead, examining the combination has been the benchmark for helping establish originality. In modern times, the idea of the unique combination or perspective remains a measurement of originality, but the chunks of combined material are likely to be larger. According to Goldsmith, "With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information- how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it- is what distinguishes my writing from yours" (Goldsmith). In other words, Goldsmith placed…
