Reviewing What We Learned about Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a scary thing for most college students, but as we've seen in this module, there are easy ways to combat plagiarism. Let's review.
- According to the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (Links to an external site.), plagiarism is "the uncredited use (both intentional and unintentional) of somebody else's words or ideas."
- We can avoid plagiarizing by correctly quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing, and by citing our sources.
- We should cite anything that isn't our own ideas, words, images, or something that isn't commonly known by most people.
- To cite properly, we must include both an in-text citation and a full bibliographic citation in the Bibliography or list of Works Cited or References.
- Quoting means to include the exact words an author used and cite where we found the information.
- Paraphrasing and summarizing mean to put someone else's ideas or words into our own words, but we still need to cite when we do this. Paraphrases are usually about the same length as the original, and summaries are usually shorter.
- To paraphrase or summarize, we read and understand the original text and then write the concepts we learned in our own words, checking the original source at the end to make sure we didn't borrow too much from it.
Help
For more help with recognizing and avoiding plagiarism, contact a librarian at the Highline College Library.