Agenda: MLA Library Session 2014

1. Agenda: MLA Library Session 2014 • What is plagiarism? • What are my options to avoid it? • Brief introduction to MLA and Purdue OWL • Purdue Scavenger Hunt

2. Pop Quiz: Which of these situations are plagiarism? • Copying one paragraph of your paper from a friend. • Using a quote from a website in your benchmark project paper, with a parenthetical citation, but forgetting to put quotation marks around it. • Using ideas, but not direct quotations, from SparkNotes. • Cutting and pasting a sentence from a website and then changing some of the words to synonyms. • Putting “Barack Obama is the President of the United States” in your paper and not citing that fact. • You have citations, but almost the whole paper is quotes. • You have parenthetical citations, but you got them mixed up and they do not lead to the right source.

3. What is Plagiarism? “…Passing off as one’s own someone else’s work or ideas (from Latin plagiārius, kidnapper, literary thief).” ~ Macmillan Dictionary ANY TIME YOU USE SOMEONE ELSE'S IDEA, cite it.

4. What’s The Big Deal? At Irvington, if you plagiarize: • 1st time: Zero on the assignment, call home, conference with parent and administrator. Can lose class privileges like contracts. • 2nd time: NC in the class • 3rd time: loss of extracurriculars, expulsion In the “Real World,” if you plagiarize, you may… • Be expelled from college the firsttime • Lose your job • Lose recommendations to another college or job • Be sued by the person whose idea you “borrowed”

5. Are there any times I DON’T need to cite? • Info is so general it’s common knowledge. Nobody would need to look it up: • George Washington was the first US President. • Most schools have a summer vacation. • The Earth revolves around the sun. • Pollution is bad for the environment. • When the idea is your own: Romeo and Juliet’s relationship is difficult for modern audiences to understand because the characters fall in love more quickly than modern people. When in Doubt, Cite!

6. Instead of Plagiarizing, there are 2 choices… • Summarize or Paraphrase Put the information completely in your own words, with a citation. Or… 2. Use direct quotations Use the authors words, with “quotation marks around them” and a citation.

7. “Citing your sources” has 2 parts: Works Cited Bily, Cynthia A. The Impact of E-Waste. Chicago: Greenhaven Press, 2009. Print. Mayo, Katie. Personal interview. 16 Oct. 2012. “Pollution.” The World Book Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. 2003. Print. A page at the end of your paper listing each source you used…

8. and Parenthetical citations inside the essay: The author and page number (OR the page title if no author) right after the fact or quote: Burrowing owls are an endangered species because of their habitat. “Burrowing owls live in underground dens that are easily threatened by construction projects” (Miller 55). Even if construction crews don’t hurt the owls, the birds may still become too afraid to lay eggs. Burrowing owl populations have gone down by 45% in the last ten years (“Threatened Bird Statistics”). Construction companies need to look for burrowing owls before they start working on a new project.

9. …in MLA format • We all have to use the same format to write papers & list our sources at the end of the paper • MLA Handbook = a set of rules to do this • Why?

10. You’d have to have superpowers to memorize the MLA Handbook… So where can you go to get help? • Your planner • Irvington.org/mla • Expert sites like Purdue OWL