Avoiding plagiarism
plagiarize= take (the work or an idea of someone else) and pass it off as one's own
You plagiarize when you use someone else's idea* and do not credit her or him for it because you
don't provide appropriate acknowledgement of your source,
*idea: not only sentences but also line of thinking, argument, phrase or word
Examples of plagiarism, taken from MLA Handbook, Modern Language Association of America,
1988
Source:
The major concern of Dickinson's poetry early and late,
her "flood subjects," may be defined as the seasons and
nature, death and a problematic afterlife, the kinds and
phases of love, and poetry as the divine art
(Literary History of the United States, vol.1, p. 906)
Integrated into your paper as:
the chief subjects of Emily Dickinson's poetry include nature and the
seasons, death and the afterlife, the various types and stages of love, and
poetry itself as a divine art
This paraphrase is plagiarism!
You can avoid plagiarism if you credit the authors:
"Gibson and Williams suggest that ... (906)"
"... as a divine art (Gibson and Williams, 906)."
"... as a divine art.1"
Another example. Source:
This, of course, raises the central question of this
paper: What should we be doing? Research and training in
the whole field of restructuring the world as an
"ecotopia" (eco- from oikos, household; -topia from
topos, place, with implication of "eutopia" - "good
place") will presumably be the goal.
E. N. Anderson, Jr. "The Life and Culture of Ecotopia," Reinventing
Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes [1969; New York: Vintage-Random,
1974] 275
Plagiarized as:
Humankind should attempt to create what we might call an "ecotopia."
The student has borrowed a specific term without documentation
Humankind should attempt to create what Anderson has called an
"ecotopia" (275)
Third example. Original source:
Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the
deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of
all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged
