It is no doubt that citing information is important; give credit where credit is due. After all, if I worked hard to research or write something, I would like people to know that it is my own work. In my college career I have only used MLA citation, until this course. Citations in my opinion are a necessity, though they can be quite frustrating to master. Getting even one bit of information out of order or missing one letter or number makes it wrong. I understand why this is of course; the information must be exact in order to give credit. I completely understand the issue of plagiarism, but I think sometimes flags are raised by simple mistakes. I can guarantee that there is no point in time where I have ever intentionally plagiarized information; largely because I don’t think I have the capacity to actually cheat on something. The idea that I could get kicked out of college, be sued, or go to jail because of a single sentence is too terrifying for me. Why even take the risk?

In my experience, deciding what is general knowledge and special knowledge can be a bit confusing. General knowledge applies to things that “everyone should know”, things like grass being green, or the planets revolving around the sun. But what about knowledge that you know that others may not know? I personally know a lot of trivial facts both within my line of study and outside. When writing about something in my field that for my major would be general knowledge, I could get marked for not citing a source. For example, If I wrote a paper about a piece I was playing, it is common knowledge to musicians that Percy Grainger wrote The Children’s March. Since I know this and didn’t pick this from a book or article, I had no reason to cite this. However in my paper this information was marked wrong for either not having proof or for plagiarism since there’s an article that could mention Grainger wrote the piece. While I realize that this is an extreme example, these things could happen, and I have been in situations similar to this example. What classifies as general for some people might not be for others. In this we would have to assume that general knowledge applies to only the most basic concepts (like the color of grass or the existence of gravity.) I feel as though information that is deemed “special knowledge” should be something that at any point had to be researched for the sake of writing, or when citing research and studies themselves. Obviously the point of research is discovering the things that aren’t known. To compare special knowledge to common knowledge, like the example with my paper, I suppose that it comes down to know who your audience is.