Plagiarism - What It Is and How to Avoid It

Plagiarism
What It Is and
How To Avoid It
Why is it Important?
Massive
quantities of information
are readily available on the
internet.
As
a result of this easy access,
instances of plagiarism and
cheating have become
widespread in educational
institutions.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the
act of stealing
someone else's
creative work
and misrepresenting
the work as
your own. This
can apply to
any creative
work including:
term papers,
photographs,
songs, even
theories!
Copying: Original Text
Standing there, watching them, it occurred to
me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys
fight their way back from the rear of the field to
sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five
years ago, he saw, but did not recognize, heralds
of his doom. He could not have known that one
day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them,
boys who shared their essential natures—decent
and unassuming, not privileged or favored by
anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and
perseverant—would return to Germany dressed
in olive drab, hunting him down.
Copying: An Example
If a writer copies, word for word, the text
from Daniel James Brown's book and does
not acknowledge in any way that it was Mr.
Brown's work, the writer has committed
plagiarism.
Types: Patchwork Plagiarism
The second kind of plagiarism
is unfortunately quite
common among young
students: patchwork
plagiarism. It occurs when a
writer takes a paragraph from
another writer and tries to
disguise it’s origin by replacing
random words and phrases.
Patchwork: An Example
It occurred to me that when Hitler watched
Joe and the boys slowly claw their way to the
front of the race, he saw, but did not
recognize, heralds of his doom. He couldn’t
have known then what we know now, that
less than 8 years later, American boys—
decent and unassuming, not privileged or
favored by anything in particular, just loyal,
committed, and perseverant—would
descend upon Germany dressed in army
fatigues to hunt down Nazis and put an end
to their reign of terror.
Patchwork: An Example
To fix the previous example, the author
would have to put the red (borrowed)
phrases in quotations and add a citation
after the quotation1.
Without the quotation marks and the proper
citation, the "author" has committed
plagiarism.
This would be the correct footnote/endnote:
1Daniel
James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans
and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
(New York: Viking, 2014) 368.
Types: Paraphrasing Plagiarism
The third type of plagiarism is called
paraphrasing plagiarism. This occurs when the
plagiarizer paraphrases or summarizes
another's work without citing the source. Even
changing the words a little or using synonyms
but retaining the author's essential thoughts,
sentence structure, and/or style without citing
the source is still considered plagiarism.
Paraphrasing: An Example
It is interesting to note that during the 1936
Olympics, when the Washington University
varsity rowing team came from behind to
beat both Germany and Italy while Hitler
watched from the sidelines, what Hitler
was really watching was a foreshadowing
of his doom. Later, boys just like the ones
who had beaten his strong German
rowing team, would return to Germany in
army fatigues to beat Hitler himself.
Paraphrasing: An Example
Now, had the "author" of this paragraph
used footnotes or parenthetical citations to
acknowledge Mr. Brown’s work, he or she
would have been in the clear. However,
since the "author" acts like these ideas are
his or her own, and does not acknowledge
Mr. Brown, it's plagiarism.
Types: Unintentional
The fourth type of plagiarism
is called unintentional
plagiarism -- it occurs when
the writer incorrectly quotes
and/or incorrectly cites a
source they are using.
How is this plagiarism, if the
author didn't mean to do it?
Types: Unintentional
If a writer has incorrectly quoted or incorrectly
cited a source, it could be misconstrued as
dishonesty on the writer's part. Therefore, the
incorrect usage of another's work, whether it's
intentional or not, could be taken for "real"
plagiarism.
TEACHERS DON’T READ MINDS.
We don’t know what you *MEANT* to do!
Avoiding Plagiarism
Avoiding plagiarism is quite simple. The best
method for avoiding it is to simply be honest:
when you've used a source in your paper, give
credit where it's due. Acknowledge the author
of the original work you've used.
Another way to avoid plagiarism is to use your
own work as often as possible. Quoting and
citing sources is usually required and inevitable
when doing research -- that's how you
“support" your own work. But using someone
else's work excessively can be construed as
plagiarism.
Always make sure you track your sources
carefully as you research!!
First, let’s compare the
footnote to the bibliography…
Which is which? And what’s the
difference?
Brown, Daniel James. The Boys in the
Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic
Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin
Olympics. New York: Viking, 2014.
1Daniel
James Brown, The Boys in the
Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest
for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (New
York: Viking, 2014), 289.
Chicago Citations
According to author Daniel James Brown, the
1936 Washington Varsity rowing team were
“…representatives of something much larger
than themselves - a way of life, a shared set of
values.”1
1Daniel
James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and
Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (New York:
Viking, 2014), 289.
Chicago Citations
Despite the fact that anti-Semitism was
rampant throughout Germany following Hitler’s
rise to power, the Nazis worked “…to
camouflage its violent racist policies while it
hosted the Summer Olympics.”2
2
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Nazi Olympics
Berlin 1936,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, last modified June 20, 2014.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ article.php?ModuleId=10005680.
Chicago Citations
The boys on the 1936 Olympic rowing team
"had been winnowed down by punishing
competition, and in the winnowing a kind
of common character had issued forth:
they were all skilled, they were all tough,
they were all fiercely determined, but they
were all good-hearted…”3
3Brown,
The Boys in the Boat, 241.
Chicago Citations
“They were rowing as if on another
plane, as if in a black void among the
stars, just as Pocock [the English-born
boat builder and U.W. rowing guru]
had said they might. And it was
beautiful.”4
4Ibid.,
259.
Mix It Up…
Signal Phrase & Quote: After spending years
researching the young men of the 1936 Olympic
rowing team, author Daniel James Brown
expressed “…gratitude for their goodness and their
grace, their humility and their honor, their simple
civility and all the things they taught us before they
flitted across the evening water and finally
vanished into the night.”5
Paraphrasing: After the Olympics were over,
Nazi Germany abandoned all pretext and returned
to their persecution of Jews and other minority
groups.6
5Ibid.,
368.
6Ibid., 359.
Plagiarism Self-Checkers
When in doubt, use one of these
websites to self-check any passage
or excerpt of your writing.
http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
http://plagium.com/
http://paperrater.com
Plagiarism Presentation
Resources
This presentation was adapted from:
http://www.ulm.edu/~lowe/plagiarism.ppt
The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
Pocket Style Manual (no longer required
but recommended)