Plagiarizing
You know the definition of plagiarism—using someone else’s words, work, or ideas and passing them off as your own. Some plagiarism is intentional. Using an essay-writing service, for example, is obviously and intentionally plagiarism. It’s wrong, and we all know it, so I don’t have much to say about it here.
However, the majority of plagiarism—at least in first-year college classes—is inadvertent. It usually happens when a student is trying to paraphrase, quote, or cite a source, but they fail to do so correctly. Let’s take each of these in turn.
Paraphrasing and Plagiarizing
Paraphrase is the biggest culprit. When a student tries to paraphrase, but ends up patchwriting instead, the language sticks too close to the original. The best way to avoid this, at least until you become more expert with paraphrasing, is the process I describe in the section on paraphrasing:
- Understand the passage
- Close the source
- Give yourself a short break
- Write the paraphrase
- Check it against the original
If your paraphrase is still too close to the original in either word choice or sentence structure (or both), try paraphrasing your paraphrase.
Quoting and Plagiarizing
Quotations make it easier to avoid plagiarism, but you can still make mistakes.
The most common mistake I see is a student’s failing to use quotation marks when the words come directly from the source. When you use exact language from a source, even if it is a phrase of just a few words, you must use quotation marks. You don’t need to do this around commonly used language and phrasing, but if the wording is at all specific to the source, you need to include the quotation marks. If you don’t have quotation marks around that exact language, you are claiming the language as your own, which could be considered plagiarism.
Citing and Plagiarizing
Sometimes students forget to include the citations themselves, which can be considered plagiarism. Every time you quote and every time you paraphrase, you need to give credit to your source. The specifics of what the citation will look like vary, but if you don’t have a citation, you could be accused of plagiarism.
This is especially true of in-text citations. Most professors will see a source missing from your list and assume a mistake, but missing in-text citations, particularly when citing paraphrases, aren’t as obviously mistakes.
This problem seems to happen most to students who think that they will add the citations later. While this strategy can work to help you keep drafting, if you don’t leave yourself some kind of reminder that you need to add the citations, you can have a serious problem later on. If you draft this way, I recommend that you add parentheses as a reminder. It can be even more helpful if you put some kind of reminder about which source you are using.
Another common problem I see is students thinking that it’s enough to include a citation at the end of a paragraph, particularly when there are several sentences from the s