55 9.2 Plagiarism
Plagiarism occurs when someone uses another person’s intellectual property and doesn’t give them credit. Intellectual property is defined as material or ideas envisioned and created by another person. There are many kinds of intellectual property, including books, articles, essays, stories, poems, films, photographs, works of art or craft, or even just ideas. For example, if you copy text out of a textbook or article and use it in your homework assignment so it looks like you wrote it – that’s plagiarism. If someone else thought of an idea and brought it into the world, they own it, and if you use their idea in your work, you have to acknowledge them as the actual owner. If you don’t, you’ve committed plagiarism. That’s not a good idea!
Plagiarism is a kind of academic dishonesty—a kind of theft. Colleges and universities take plagiarism seriously; assignments can get a grade of zero, and many institutions discipline or even expel students who are found to be plagiarizing.
Many educators used to believe that students plagiarized either because they were lazy or because they just didn’t care about anything but getting that final piece of paper: the degree or certificate. Both of these reasons are still true sometimes: we’ve all met people who don’t like to work hard (or at all!) or who, in the case of college, just want that piece of paper and don’t care how they get it.
But today, thanks to the work of innovative educators, instructors know that plagiarism and cheating are often motivated by more complicated factors.
As for you: how can you avoid plagiarism? It’s actually quite simple:
- As much as possible, do your own work. In other words, always start by writing what you know about a subject, turning to sources only when you need to support your own ideas with authoritative backing or when there’s a knowledge gap you cannot fill on your own. Or, of course, to satisfy requirements imposed by your instructor or professor who may ask you to use a certain number of sources in completing an assignment. But even then, much of the work should be your own.
- Take notes carefully. If you add source material to your work, mark it or identify it in such a way that you will know it’s from a source. Cite the work immediately and add it to your works cited list. (See 9.3 Referencing Sources)
- If you use someone else’s intellectual property, give them credit. If you bring their work into your assignment, you must mention them as the work’s owners. There are accepted formats to give credit which you will read about in the next section.
There are a number of different practices which could lead to or be defined as plagiarism, so it’s important that you understand what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn’t.
Exercise: Identifying Plagiarism
Which of these would be a kind of plagiarism?
- Copying written material from the Web and pasting it into your paper so it would look like you wrote it.
- Overhearing someone’s great idea while riding in