Jess Tronch
Prez [home]
|
|
|
|
Jess Tronch
Prez [home]
|
Definition of Plagiarism = In
an instructional setting, plagiarism occurs when a writer
deliberately uses someone elses language, ideas, or other
original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowleding
its source (Council of Writing Program Adminsitrators).
You
plagiarize when you use someone else's ideas* and pass it off
as your own, that is, you do not credit her or him for it
because you don't provide appropriate acknowledgement of your
source.
*ideas:
not only sentences but also line of thinking, argument, or a
very specific phrase or word that defines a new concept.
Examples
of plagiarism, taken from Gibaldi and Achterts MLA Handbook:
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 it if you credit the authors
by
including the source in your sentence as in
"Gibson
and Williams suggest that ... (906)",
or by
including the source in a parenthetical citation, footnote or
endnote
"... 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 acknowledging who
coined this terms. This plagiarism is avoided in the following
example:
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 in building a remarkable civilization from the
ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.
Until now the human race has
undergone two great waves of change, each one largely
obliterating earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing
them with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before.
The First Wave of change - the agricultural revolution- took
thousands of years to play itself out. The Second Wave -the
rise of industrial civilization- took a mere hundred years.
Today history is even more accelerative, and it is likely that
the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself
in a few decades.
Avin
Toffler, The Third Wave,
[1980; New York: Bantam, 1981] 10.
Plagiarized
as:
There have been two
revolutionary periods of change in history: the agricultural
revolution and the industrial revolution. The agricultural
revolution determined the course of history for thousands of
years; the industrial civilization lasted about a century. We
are now on the threshold of a new period of revolutionary
change, but this one may last for only a few decades.
The
student has taken Tofflers line of thinking without
acknowledging his or her debt to Toffler.
You
dont give enough acknowledgment by listing the sources
consulted in a final bibliography. Your should allow your to
know what idea or material you have taken from what source.
You
also commit plagiarism when you hand in a paper you have
already delivered in another module to another teacher. This
is self-palgiarism!