AVOIDING PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is a serious offense, a theft of intellectual property. As punishable as any other form of theft, the consequences of plagiarism may mean receiving a zero for an assignment, failure for a course, suspension from school, or a lawsuit initiated by the original author. Consult the Honesty Policy of your school for its definition and consequences. Plagiarism occurs whether intended or not, as a result of deceit, laziness, or carelessness in reading, note taking and piecing together information.

Plagiarism is:

Handing in work belonging to someone else as your own, whether copied or purchased from an Internet source.

Word for word copying, an entire document, a paragraph, sentence, unique phrase, specialized term, exclusive data, or an image, without quotation marks or crediting the author.

Summarizing or paraphrasing words / ideas without accurately citing the source. Academic dishonesty also includes inventing sources or providing inaccurate citations.

Summarizing or paraphrasing words but not putting them in your own words or sentence structure though still citing the source.

Avoid all academic dishonesty by:

Keeping accurate bibliographic information in reference cards.

Placing quotations with quotation marks in the quotation box of the note cards

Putting summaries and paraphrases in your own words. This means that you use your vocabulary and your sentence structure, not merely the substitution of a few words in the original sentence with a synonym so that your paraphrase is close to the original passage. Avoid this problem by taking notes without having the original text before you. Think about what you are reading and record this information accurately in your note cards.

Creating a calendar of due dates for managing your time. For users of Microsoft office, open Entourage, and click the calendar button. For Mac users of iCal, click the program open. Enter in your calendar the due date for the final paper. Then working backwards, create your own due dates for reference cards; note cards and thus completion of research; outline or organizational tool; rough draft; peer editing; and final copy a few days before it is due so that you can reread it after you have been away from it for a while.