Preventing Plagiarism: A Guide for Students

This guide pulls together a number of resources to assist you, the student, avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism can be an intentional or accidental act, but either way you can suffer severe consequences.

Defining Plagiarism

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition defines the act of plagiarizing as:

"To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own." or "To appropriate for use as one's own passages or ideas from (another). Intr. To put forth as original to oneself the ideas or words of another."

Books and resources which provide information on writing research papers and citing information generally include a definition of plagiarism:

"By definition, a research paper involves the assimilation of prior scholarship and entails the responsibility to give proper acknowledgment whenever one is indebted to another for either words or ideas. ... Failure to give credit is plagiarism." Turabian, Kate. L. A Manual for Writers of Termpapers, Theses, and Dissertations, sixth edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.

"To use another person's ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the sources is to plagiarize. Plagiarism, then, constitutes intellectual theft. Strictly speaking, it is a moral and ethical offense rather than a legal one, since most instances of plagiarism fall outside the scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense." Gibaldi, Joseph, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 5th ed. Modern Language Association of America, New York, 1999.

Although they may be worded slightly differently, they all state the same thing: Plagiarism is cheating!

The following are all examples of plagiarism:

Copying the words of others, whether from a source or another student Putting your name on a paper written by someone else Purchasing or downloading in paper from the Internet and turning it in Paraphrasing (rewriting in your own words) a source and not documenting it Not using quotation marks properly when using material from another source

For more information go to: https://www.millikin.edu/academics/academic-resources/writingcenter/plagiarism-policy