Plagiarism, Citation, and Sources

Introduction

What is plagiarism and how can you avoid committing it? This activity aims to help you answer those questions.

You can find many definitions of plagiarism on-line. Find them. Get a feeling for what this funny looking word means. It's very important. Learning how to identify and avoid plagiarism is possibly the most important thing you can learn in this class.

Over the years, I've had continuous problems with students committing plagiarism. Sometimes they may be aware of it, sometimes not, but it doesn't matter. Ignorance is no excuse. You attend university in part to lose ignorance, or better said, to gain knowledge. Therefore, to claim that you were not aware that you committed plagiarism in this class, and in the larger academic community, means nothing.

But there's a good, very positive, very empowering side to all this mess about plagiarism. By avoiding plagiarism, your writing will improve exponentially. It's very easy to avoid plagiarism; you simply give credit to your sources. You cite your sources of information. In citing your sources, your writing becomes more powerful because you are showing that your information and arguments are based on not just your own thoughts and opinions, but on a larger body of thought, evidence, and discussion.

Yale University defines plagiarism as follows:

In addition to there being many definitions of plagiarism, there are also many citation formats, some of which do get rather complex, even annoying. For this activity, we are not going to worry too much about having perfect citation format. I will give you a number of examples of formats you can follow, and you can easily find plenty of examples on-line, but I'm not going to worry about a misplaced comma or something that should be in parenthesis that isn't. The purpose of a citation is to give credit to your source and, just as importantly, to give your reader a means of finding that source. The art of citation is to do this in a way that is complete without interrupting the flow of your writing.

The citation above giving credit to Yale probably does not perfectly follow an established citation framework, such as APA or MLA, two of the most common. But again, we're not worrying about perfectly following one citation format or another for this activity. We're focusing on giving credit to your sources and giving your reader a means to find those sources. Keep in mind, however, that in formal academic writing, you do need to use a very specific citation format. For example, you might have written an excellent article, but it won't get published if your citation and reference format do not exactly follow the guidelines defined by the publisher.

So, now that you're all excited about learning more about plagiarism, citation, and sources, are you ready to get started? Great!

Did you know that...

A list of general writing resources can be found at http://cailab.net/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Writing.