51 Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is using someone else’s work without giving him or her credit.  “Work” includes text, ideas, images, videos, and audio. In the academic world, you must follow these rules:

• When you use the exact words, you must use quotation marks and provide a citation.
• When you put the information into your own words, you must provide a citation.
• When you use an image, audio, or video created by someone else, you must provide a citation.

Plagiarism could happen with a sentence, a paragraph, or even just a word! For example, Stephen Colbert, of the television show The Colbert Report, made up the word “truthiness,” meaning something that sounds like it should be true. If you say in a paper something has a ring of “truthiness,” you should cite Colbert. If someone else’s words catch your interest, you should cite them.

Figure 7.3 Colbert in May 2009

Writing at Work

 

Plagiarism isn’t just a problem in the academic world. There are many examples of people who plagiarized at work and faced severe consequences. Jonah Lehrer (https://tinyurl.com/yb2ah7me), an author and staff writer for The New Yorker, fabricated quotes and copied previous work for his book Imagine. Once his plagiarism was revealed, his book was removed from bookstores and he was forced to resign from his job.

Why should I cite?

Whenever you use sources, it is important that you document them completely and accurately. You make your work more useful to your reader through complete and careful documentation, so you should think of documentation as essential rather than as an  “add on” tacked on at the last minute.

When asked why you should cite your sources, many students reply, “So you don’t get accused of plagiarizing.” It is true that you must provide citations crediting others’ work so as to avoid plagiarism, but scholars use citations for many other (and more important!) reasons:

• To make your arguments more credible.  You want to use the very best evidence to support your claims.  For example, if you are citing a statistic about a disease, you should be sure to use a credible, reputable source like the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control (CDC). When you tell your reader the statistic comes from such a source, she will know to trust it– and thereby trust your argument more.

• To show you’ve done your homework.  You want to make it clear to your audience that you’ve researched your subject, tried hard to inform yourself, and know what you are talking about.  As you dive deeper into your research, you will probably find certain authors are experts on the topic and are mentioned in most of the articles and books.  You should read these experts’ works and incorporate them into your paper.

• To build a foundation for your paper.  Great breakthroughs in scholarship are accomplished by building on the earlier, groundbreaking work of others. For example, Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation would not have been possible without Johannes Kepler’s law of planetary motion.  What articles, books, and texts, inspired you to create your argument?  You are not the first person to ever consider this issue. You want to provide references to the works which led to your thesis.

• To allow your readers to find the sources for themselves.  Someone interested in your topic may be inspired to read some of the sources you used to write your paper.  The citation within the paper tells readers what part of your argument is addressed by a particular source, and the full citation in the bibliography provides the information needed to track down that original research.

How can I avoid plagiarism?

Don’t procrastinate.  Students who rush make careless mistakes, such as forgetting to include a particular citation or not having all the information needed for documentation. Students under pressure may also make poor choices, such as not documenting sources and hoping the professor won’t notice. Your professor will notice.

Take careful notes.  You need to be very clear in your notes whether you are writing down word-for-word what you found somewhere else, or if you are jotting down your own idea. You should take down all the information you will need to create your citations.

Cite your sources. Whenever you quote, paraphrase, summarize, or share an unusual fact, tell your reader where the information came from.

Document at the same time you draft. As you begin drafting, prepare a correctly formatted Works Cited page that captures the information also needed for in-text citations. Insert citations into your paper as you are writing it. If you cite-as-you-go, you won’t consume time looking up information all over again at the end, and you make it less likely that you will misidentify or omit necessary documentation.

Get comfortable with the required citation style.  The most commonly used citation styles are APA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian.  While they share many similarities, they also have differing requirements about what and when to cite. In English, we use MLA style. See section number 16 for more information about MLA citations.

Figure 7.5 Citations

Ask your professor. If you’re not sure about citing something, check with your instructor. Learning when to cite, how to lead-in to sources, and how to integrate them into your sentence structures and ideas takes place over time and with feedback.

What is common knowledge?

Common knowledge is information that is accepted and known so widely you do not need to cite it:

• Common sayings or cliches. Examples: Curiosity killed the cat.  Ignorance is bliss.
• Facts that can be easily verified. As you are conducting your research on a topic, you will see the same facts repeated over and over.  Example: You are writing a paper on presidential elections, and you want to mention that Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.  Although you might not have known this fact before your research, you have seen it multiple times and no one ever argues about it.
• Facts that you can safely assume your readers know.  Examples: Richmond is the capital of Virginia. The North won the U.S. Civil War.  Fish breathe using gills.

Not all facts are common knowledge. You will still need to cite:

• Facts that surprise you or your reader.  Example: Michelangelo was shorter than average (Hughes and Elam 4).
• Facts that include statistics or other numbers. Example: As of June 2009, forty-two states had laws that explicitly ban gay marriage, and six states have legalized it (U.S. Department of Labor).
• If you use the exact words of another writer, even if the content could be considered common knowledge.  Example: Lincoln’s first campaign dates to “1832, when he ran as a Whig for the Illinois state legislature from the town of New Salem and lost” (Lincoln 451).