29 Deconstructing Plagiarism
Kristy Kelly
Plagiarism Is Complicated Stuff
We all know we’re not supposed to plagiarize, but what exactly does that mean? Taking ideas from someone else? Copying their words directly? Quoting someone else’s language without citing it? As with most things in writing classes, it turns out that plagiarism is contextual. The expectations for attribution and originality shift along with culture, academic discipline, and medium. We’ll talk more about all of that later in this chapter.
But just because plagiarism is a contextual, slippery concept doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant or impossible to track what counts as plagiarism. In fact, as an author, it lies exclusively with you to track where the ideas you’re working with come from, to attribute them properly, and to understand exactly what constitutes plagiarism in the first place so that you can steer clear of it. One of our favorite sources for understanding citation practices, the Purdue OWL, defines plagiarism as “using someone else’s ideas or words without giving them proper credit” (“Plagiarism Overview”). It can certainly be difficult to trace where someone else’s ideas start and where yours begin or where your paraphrasing of a source starts and the original language you’re building from ends. But even accounting for those blurry lines, it’s still never OK to pass someone else’s work off as your own.
In this chapter, we’ll talk about how to navigate those blurry lines between working with someone’s ideas and co-opting them and between paraphrasing a source and patchwriting from it. We’ll also look at the deeper cultural perceptions of originality and attribution. By the end, you’ll have a sense for how to avoid plagiarism and, more importantly, why to avoid it.
So What Exactly Is Plagiarism Again?
Let’s break it down. We know that plagiarism involves including other peoples’ ideas or language in your work without attribution. But one of the reasons that plagiarism can feel so fuzzy is that it can be difficult to trace what exactly counts as “including other peoples’ ideas” or what kind of attribution is needed. There’s also a spectrum of severity when it comes to plagiarism, ranging everywhere from letting an author’s phrasing slip into your work without putting quotation marks around it to full-on copy-and-pasting paragraphs from a source without a citation. There’s even such a thing as self-plagiarism, which involves copying your own writing from a previous context or assignment and including it in a new piece of writing without alerting your reader (or, in many cases, your instructor).
In most academic contexts you’re likely to encounter in an American college setting, the following can be considered plagiarism:
- Copying wholesale phrases, sentences, or paragraphs from another source without citing, either in the in-text citations or in the works cited / reference list.
- Including language from an outside source without putting it in quotation marks, even