The Plagiarism Page
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What is Plagiarism?
Intential Plagiarism
Unintentional Plagiarism
Basics of Paraphrasing
Avoiding Paraphrasing Pitfalls
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is a form of cheating that involves using someone else’s ideas, information, or words as if they were your own. When you plagiarize, you take credit away from the original author and give it to yourself instead.
Most of the time, students plagiarize by mistake, either because they aren’t careful enough about keeping track of their research materials or because they simply don’t know how to quote, cite, or paraphrase correctly. When you’re first learning, occasional honest mistakes are understandable, but please try to learn from them. The information below should help clear up your difficulties.
A few students plagiarize on purpose. These students deceive the reader into thinking they came up with somebody else’s words or ideas. Whether this is because they want a good grade, positive feedback, or one less homework headache, it’s wrong. In addition to harming the original author, they’re wasting the reader’s time and giving themselves a reputation for being dishonest. They’re also denying themselves the opportunity to learn.
Ironically, plagiarism can sometimes make your writing worse. In today’s world, there is a great deal of information available, but not all of it is correct. If you don’t tell your readers where you got your information, they won’t be able to tell if it comes from a good source, and they won’t know how much to trust it. On the other hand, if you find, share, and give credit to an excellent source of information, you make your own paper better, and you give your readers the chance to use and learn from that information, too.
It’s important to learn how to avoid plagiarism now. As you advance in education and enter the adult world, the consequences of mistakes become more and more severe. Some college professors give failing grades to papers that contain any instance of plagiarism—even if it’s accidental—and many universities expel students after two or three offenses. The adult world is even less forgiving.
Students who deliberately plagiarize do so in many ways. They may buy a whole essay online, convince a friend or sibling to do their work for them, or cut and paste text directly from internet sources without giving those sources credit.
Teachers and evaluators are good at detecting plagiarism. If they’re familiar with a student’s writing style and knowledge level, it’s often blatantly obvious that the work was done by someone else. Many educators have access to software that can help them detect plagiarism, and virtually all are now able to use internet search engines to help them find sources published online. If you plagiarize on purpose, you are likely to get caught.
It is never okay to buy, borrow or steal a paper. You might argue that paying money for a piece of writing makes it your own, but think about this for a moment. If you buy a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, does that make the writing yours? Of course not. The physical copy of the book is yours, and that’s all. It works the same way with an essay.
You might say that you should be able to use a friend’s work if the friend doesn’t mind, or a stranger’s work if the stranger doesn’t know about it, but this isn’t true. You didn’t do the work, so you’re cheating if you pretend you did. When you turn in a plagiarized paper, you anger and offend your teachers, your readers, and possibly even your fellow students. If you make a habit of plagiarizing, you’ll miss out on developing basic writing skills you’ll need in order to accomplish your future goals.
In order to avoid unintentional plagiarism, you must always give an author credit for his or her facts, ideas, and wording. It’s okay to use another person’s facts and ideas, but only if you put them in your own words and include the source in a bibliography or works cited page. Using the original author’s exact wording is okay, too, but only if you put the words in quotation marks and tell the reader who wrote them. If you’re in seventh grade or above, you should also use in-text citations to let your reader know exactly where you got your information. If you don’t do these things, you are committing plagiarism. (See the Bibliography and Works Cited Guidelines for more information about in-text citations, bibliographies, and works cited pages.)
As you begin doing research for a paper, keep track of what you’re writing down. Your own ideas are easy; because they belong to you, there’s no need to cite them. However, if you’re summarizing or paraphrasing somebody else’s ideas, you should write down whose ideas they are. If you jot down the exact words from any source, make a note of that, too. In the long run, this saves you time, because at the end of the writing process, you won’t have to look through every single source to figure out which ones you used for what. It also saves you from accidentally thinking somebody else’s words—written in your own handwriting—are your own.
Writing somebody else’s ideas in your own words can be tricky. It’s not enough to simply change the order of the words or find synonyms for a couple of the terms in the quote. Instead, you need to come up with whole sentences of your own. If you write more than three words in a row that are identical to the ones in the original text, you’re probably plagiarizing.
Imagine you’re writing a research paper on orca whales, and you want to use the following information from “Creature Feature: Orcas” by Catherine D. Hughes:
Original text: “Sometimes a pod of whales will join forces to surround a larger animal, such as a blue whale. They chase, bite, and wear it down until it becomes a meal.”
You try changing a few of the words and putting the word “sometimes” in a different spot, like this:
Plagiarism: A pod of orcas will sometimes get together to surround a bigger animal, such as a blue whale. They follow, attack, and wear it down until it becomes a meal.
You’ve made a good start, but too many exact phrases are the same, including one string of nine words: “and wear it down until it becomes a meal.” When you’re summarizing, it’s always tempting to keep phrases like these because they seem so good, but that usually leads to retaining too many of the original words. It’s better to use your own wording entirely:
Paraphrase: Orca pods occasionally hunt bigger animals, even blue whales. The orcas team up to tire out their huge prey until they can make the kill (Hughes).
This paraphrase contains the same information as the original text, but it uses very few of the same words. It has been made shorter; for example, the phrase “follow, bite, and wear it down” is changed to “tire out.” The paraphrase also highlights a detail that the original does not, adding the word “even” before blue whales. This is what a paraphrase should do. The words are different, but the meaning remains roughly the same.
If you are in seventh grade or above, take a second to notice the in-text citation at the end of this paraphrase. The last name of the author of the source article appears, in parentheses, before the period at the end of the paraphrased sentence. This citation tells the reader that you got your information from somebody named Hughes. If the reader wants to know more about this source, he or she will look at your works cited page, and maybe even look up the original source. If this source had come from a book or magazine instead of from the internet, the page number would be included, too. (See the Bibliography and Works Cited Guidelines for more information.)
Avoiding Paraphrasing Pitfalls
It’s often very difficult to make your paraphrase sound different enough from the original. If this is becoming a problem for you, try changing the order of the thoughts. Take a look at this sentence from the same text about orca whales:
Original text: “Orcas’ teeth, numbering about 45 and each measuring about 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) long, are shaped for ripping and tearing prey” (Hughes).
If you only find synonyms for the original words, but do not change the order of those words, your paraphrase will probably be quite weak:
Weak paraphrase: Orcas’ teeth, totaling about 45 and reaching up to 3 inches long, are made for slashing and shredding prey (Hughes).
While this paraphrase isn’t quite plagiarism, it sounds a little awkward, and it is too similar to the original quote. Changing the order of the ideas sets your mind free from the original wording and helps you find your own way to state the thought:
Good paraphrase: Orcas slash at their prey with their 45 long teeth (Hughes).
This sentence is clearly different from the original, although it retains almost all of the information. It leaves out the detail that the teeth are three inches long, but that’s okay. A paraphrase, like a summary, doesn’t have to contain every detail that is covered in the original. A good paraphrase like this one communicates the general idea in a completely new way.
There are a few times when changing the order of thoughts might not help. Certain kinds of sentences, especially those that contain lists, might seem almost impossible to rewrite in your own words:
Original text: “Orcas hunt everything from fish to walruses—seals, sea lions, penguins, squid, sea turtles, sharks, and even other kinds of whales” (Hughes).
If you change the order of the words in the list, you’re just taking Hughes’s words and moving them around, which you know is not a good paraphrasing technique. What else can you do? One option is to rewrite the idea in general terms, leaving out the specifics of the list:
Paraphrase: Orcas prey on a wide variety of ocean animals (Hughes).
This paraphrase gets the basic idea across without using the list at all. If the orca’s diet isn’t a very important part of your paper, this method is fine. However, you might want to get a sense of the variety of foods an orca eats. In this case, you could choose to quote Hughes’s exact words, putting them in quotation marks and telling the reader who wrote them. That way you could benefit from the information she wrote without risking committing plagiarism.
Questions
If you have questions, or if you need more information about plagiarism, e-mail a writing evaluator for help at writing-advice@gormanlc.com.
Work Cited
Hughes, Catherine D. “Creature Feature: Orcas.” National Geographic Kids. 2006. 11 Dec. 2006.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/kids/creature_feature/0105/orcas2.html.