Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Dear Katrina, In your essay Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, when you talk about Middle English, I found it to be plagiarized. I believe this is plagiarized because when I referred to C. Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to Literature, I noticed that the excerpt from the book and your essay follow the same exact order when stating information and are very similar throughout the paragraph. Although you argue that this is common knowledge, I believe you would have never found out of such detailed facts without doing research. You had to gather information from reliable sources. This leads me to believe that your claim of common sense is invalid and that the original material was not written by you. The author of the book spent years of careful investigation to be able to publish that information in a book, for you to just take it and rephrase it is unjust to the author’s labours. Taking information for an essay is justifiable for reinforcement of facts, however, there are no citations showing where it was taken from nor are there quotation marks enclosing any part of the writing. In the book, A Handbook to Literature it says: “English as spoken and written in the period following the Norman Conquest” while your essay wrote: “We know that Middle English refers to the type of English that people used in the time period after the Norman Conquest”. Your essay and the definition from the book are similar. You may have paraphrased it and claimed it being common sense, but to most onlookers, they can see how they both present information in the same manner and order. My advice to you is cite your sources as long as the main knowledge or idea is derived from someone else’s work. Sincerely, Mr. Sun