Avoiding Plagiarism

Avoiding Plagiarism Rules for Avoiding Plagiarism Blending Quotations into Your Own Writing

What is plagiarism? • Fundamentally, the plagiarist offers the words or ideas of another person as his/her own. • A major violation is the use of another student’s work or the purchase of a “canned” research paper. • Also flagrantly dishonest are writers who knowingly use sources without documentation.

Rules for Avoiding Plagiarism • Let the reader know when you begin borrowing from a source by introducing the quotation or paraphrase with the name of the authority. • Enclose within the quotation marks all of the quoted materials. • Make certain that prarphrased material has been rewritten into your own style and language. The simple rearrangement of sentence patterns is unacceptable. • Provide specific in-text documentation for each borrowed item. • Provide a bibliographic entry in the “Works Cited” for every source in the paper.

Checklist for Common Knowledge Exceptions • Would an intelligent person know this information? • Did you know it before you discovered it in the source? • Is it encyclopedia-type information? • Has this information become general knowledge by being reported repeatedly in many different sources?

Required Instances for Citing a Source • An original idea derived from a source, whether quoted or paraphrased. • Your summary of original ideas by a source. • Factual information that is not common knowledge. • Any exact wording copied from a source.

Try these with your team:

Improving Your Quotation Use Stages 1, 2, 3

Quotation Use Writers need to use quotations to support their points. As you are learning how to use quotations, you will probably pass through three stages of development in how you use quotations.

Stage 1: Beginning: The Un-integrated Quotation. • At this stage, the write makes a point and finishes a sentence. Then he adds a complete sentence(perhaps even two or three) lifted from his chosen text. The result is a clunky juxtaposition of student voice and quoted voice. It does, however, provide some support for the point. Example: Virginia Woolf recognizes the problems faced by women writers who lived in Elizabethan times. "That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself."

Stage 2: Intermediate: The partially-Integrated Quotation • In this case, the writer gets his quotation into one of his own sentences, but in a clumsy manner. The reader can usually detect the "speed-bump" that comes before the quotation, sometimes in the form of a quotation mark,other times in a word like "says" or "quotes" or "writes."

Stage 2: Intermediate: The partially-Integrated Quotation Example: : Virginia Woolf recognizes the problems faced by women writers who lived in Elizabethan times: "That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself." OR Virginia Woolf recognizes the problems faced by women writers who lived in Elizabethan times when she says "That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman,a woman at strife against herself."

Stage 2: Intermediate: The partially-Integrated Quotation • Sometimes a writer will shorten the quotation but still have trouble weaving the quotation in properly: Example: Virginia Woolf recognizes that women writers who lived in Elizabethan times faced great challenges, and she calls them "unhappy" and "at strife."

Stage 3: Advanced: The integrated Quotation A writer at this level has learned to weave the words of his quotation seamlessly into his own sentences. Writers who fully integrate quotations use appropriate quotations within the natural flow of their sentences. The quotation often tends to be brief, just a few words or short phrase.

Stage 3: Advanced: The integrated Quotation Example: Virginia Woolf recognizes that societal pressures in Elizabethan times forced a gifted woman writer into “strife against herself" (Blah Blah 81).

In a nutshell… So, in a nutshell, all quotations should fit into the correct grammatical structures of one of the writers sentences.

More Examples: • In The Prince Machiavelli states that a prince should "endeavor to avoid those things which would make him the object of hatred and contempt" (64).

In medieval Europe love "was not the normal basis of marriage" (Travelyan 64).

The Founders understood the new Constitution as "a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government" (Madison 343).

In Federalist 51 Madison observes, "Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens" (345).

Ziglar admits that “the extended family is now rare in contemporary society”; however, he stresses the greatest loss as the “wisdom and daily support of older, more experienced family members” (42).

“Every 11 minutes, a family will hear, “Your child has autism.” These words will change the lives of 1 child in every 88 forever. Though short, these four words will change the lives of brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers, forever.” • "We Care Act." Autism Support. WeCare.org, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2013. • (WeCare, “We Care Act”)

Avoiding Plagiarism