Avoiding Plagiarism
Plagiarism is "the action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft" (OED). According to the Modern Language Association, there are two types of plagiarism: intellectual theft and fraud (52). Intellectual theft is the use of the ideas or work of another without appropriate acknowledgement, whether the omission is accidental or not. Fraud is the attempt to pass off the work of another as one's own to gain some kind of advantage (e.g., a better grade) (52).
Plagiarism is very often unintentional, even accidental, resulting from an ignorance of the rules or a simple act of forgetting. Using the information below can help you avoid plagiarizing. You should know what you do and do not need to cite.
What Do You Need to Cite?
- Direct Quotations
- The ideas and/or thoughts taken from another's work, even if the wording is changed (i.e., paraphrasing)
- The results of another's research (e.g., statistics, polling data, etc.)
What Do You Not Need to Cite?
- Your own ideas
- Facts in the realm of common knowledge (e.g., dates, biographical information) (59)
Be sure to keep notes in the process of your research so that you can differentiate between "your ideas, your summaries and paraphrases of others’ ideas and facts, and exact wording you copy from sources" (55).
Note Be sure to mark an author’s exact wording in quotes. Accidental plagiarism occurs when you forget to use quotation marks. This commonly occurs when you copy information from an online source and paste it into an essay (55).
Please refer to the handouts provided by the Writing Lab for specific information on how to document sources in the three most common documentation styles: Modern Language Association (MLA), American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the Chicago Manual of Style.
Works Cited
Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. New York: MLA, 2009. Print.
"Plagiarism." Def. 1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2009. Online.
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