english hw

Plagiarism

You have probably heard about plagiarism for most of your academic life. Perhaps

you’ve heard about it so often that you may feel a kind of “plagiarism fatigue.” We

can all relate!

Still, it is important to discuss plagiarism because your academic work deserves the

greatest integrity that your mind can offer it. And plagiarizing is the most common

way students prevent themselves from exercising their right to think for themselves.

For this reason, we will be reviewing some specific guidelines for avoiding plagiarism

and completing some activities that will help you learn how to avoid plagiarizing.

As you know, plagiarism is the intentional or unintentional taking of someone else’s

work and presenting it as your own. Many times, students feel that they must copy

and paste what an author has said because

• they have run out of time to complete the assignment

• they are not confident that they can say what the original author has said well

enough

• they are confused about what the original author has said and feel that if they

use that author’s exact words, the ideas will be clear to readers, even if these

ideas are not clear to the students themselves

But the reality is that although engaging in copying and pasting might get you through

an assignment quickly, it will prevent you from practicing the rigorous work of

encountering the ideas of others and thinking about them for yourself. Plagiarizing

robs you of the exciting process of expressing in your own voice your analysis of a

literary work or your thoughts about an important issue. This expression in your own

voice is worth more to you and to your professors than perfectly worded statements

from experts that reveal little about your engagement with the ideas of a text.

If you are interested, you might want to read the following article by author and

journalist Brent Staples, who outlines what is at stake for students who plagiarize:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opinion/13tue4.html.

So, what does plagiarism look like?

Basically, we plagiarize in one of three ways:

1. We use the exact words of an author without quoting or providing a citation.

2. We use the exact words of an author and cite them without quoting them.

3. We paraphrase the ideas of an author and do not cite them.

The following materials will help you study what constitutes plagiarism and how you

can avoid it.

This short video lays out the basics of plagiarism and how to avoid it in under 3

minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=2q0NlWcTq1Y

This text discussion of plagiarism form the University of North Carolina Writing Lab

offers a comprehensive discussion of plagiarism: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-

and-tools/plagiarism/

Plagiarism.org also offers some good advice:

https://www.plagiarism.org/blog/2017/09/25/the-best-advice-in-avoiding-plagiarism

and https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism

This page from Nova Southeastern University offers a longer discussion on plagiarism

with some good examples. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the video.

There is a table of contents and you can click to get to a particular section of the

video: https://nsufl.libguides.com/c.php?g=111998&p=727261

These other two short videos provide similar explanations:

https://vimeo.com/156766635 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzZsButRaHs)

If you are interested in learning what Turn-it-in looks at in creating its originality

reports, here is a page https://www.turnitin.com/static/plagiarism-spectrum/ and a

video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF5eFeJMplA that describes these

features.

When you have watched and read enough of the material above, you will be ready to

take the plagiarism quiz in this lesson.