Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the intentional or unintentional use of another person’s ideas and/or words as your own. The consequences for those caught plagiarising can be very serious, as you saw in the introduction.

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You may be surprised to hear that there are different types of plagiarism, including:

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Intentional Plagiarism

The obvious one involves students simply copying (or copy+pasting) word-for-word what they have found in a book, or on a website. These types of students are either unwilling or unable to analyse what they have read or made notes on, and cannot redraft this work into their own words.

Lazy students might even aquire a similar essay from a friend or online and try and pass it off as their own. Sometimes this is done in a panic as deadlines approach, but it is always easy to spot when a student has handed in work which is clearly not their own. Particularly if they keep the citation numbers from Wikipedia at the end of sentences (see Patchworking below)!

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Unintentional plagiarism

This is similar to intentional plagiarism in that it is often done by students who do not know how to make good notes from lectures, books, websites, etc. If you are in that position, you may want to look at the Note-taking course in the Core Study Skills modules, or speak to someone in the Study Centre, room 235, top floor of the ILC for help and advice. Students who do this often don't even realise that what they are doing is plagiarism.

This kind of unintentional plagiarism takes a number of forms:

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Patchworking

This is when students copy (and paste) large chunks of text from another source (or a variety of different sources), building up a 'patchwork' of information. Sometimes they may change one or two words to try and make it look like their own work, but often it is very clear to see that the work has been patchworked, particularly when students leave footnote or citation numbers at the end of paragraphs. Although you may feel you have not directly copied everything - only what you think are the important sentences and paragraphs - this is still copying, and therefore still plagiarism.

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Idea Plagiarism

This is when students write about an idea or theory which belongs to someone else, e.g. the theory of evolution, and may use their own words to clearly describe that theory, but they forget to credit the original source of the theory (e.g. Charles Darwin), and instead make it look like it is their own work, even if they didn't mean to. This is perhaps a rarer thing to do at college, and tends to happen more at university, but it is important to always credit the original author of an idea or theory either within your writing, or in a footnote/citation, and definitely in a bibliography!

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Close paraphrasing/summarizing

As mentioned in patchworking above, this is when students only change a few words from the original text to make it look like their own, but still use too much of the original text, e.g.

Dinosaurs were most likely killed by an asteroid hitting the earth. = It is most likely that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid that hit the earth.

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If you're thinking that it would be virtually impossible to avoid doing one of the above forms of plagiarism, then you do need to spend some time learning how to take better notes, including how to better read texts for extracting and summarising information. Take a look at the Note-taking (particularly the summarising pyramids) and Reading Skills courses on this Study Skills site.

You also need to know how to paraphrase and properly quote work, which we will cover in this course, and these skills will help to improve your ability to write in your own words and credit sources more accurately.

Incidentally, plagiarism also goes for graphics, so you should always make a note of where you borrowed any images from. On this site, you can click on an image, and it will take you to the original source from where it was found...

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This section is adapted from: http://www.wcu.edu/WebFiles/PDFs/Avoiding-Plagiarism-2014.pdf