Plagiarism is representing someone else's work as your own.

It's plagiarism whether you use

• a whole document,
• a paragraph,
• a single sentence,
• a distinctive phrase,
• a specialized term,
• specific data,
• a graphic element of any kind.

It's also plagiarism if you use an idea developed by another as if it were your own.

If you use any work created by someone else as your own without acknowledging the creator, and if you hand in the work with your name on it, thus implying that it is your work, then you commit plagiarism.

On the other hand, if you carefully acknowledge your sources, you demonstrate the range and depth of your research and knowledge of your field.

You've joined a university community, where it is as important to know WHO discovered or wrote something as it is to know WHAT was discovered. Why? Because the discoverers are real researchers, real writers, real people--many of whom may well be known to your professors.

Knowing who discovered or developed the material you use gives you and your reader access to the original material and to whatever else the creator of that material may have published, a vital link in the network of knowledge.

Two Bad Examples

1. Plagiarism of a whole document.

The Plagiarism: A student was assigned to write an essay in which he was to study some feature of the language of a "mini-culture."

The student lives where there are very distinct culture and language groups within the larger population. He had cases and examples in his head already, just from growing up in that culture-rich environment. He needed to do no research in any source but his own memory. However, as he later explained, the student thought he "could not get an A" on his own writing, and in addition, had put off writing until the night before the paper was due. So he took a shortcut.

The Detection: When his teacher read the paper, she recognized immediately that it was not characteristic of his work and that it did not address the assignment accurately. It took only minutes with a web search program to find the online page in a university site that the student had simply copied, leaving out one of the 12 paragraphs, and printed under his own name.

The Judgment: The student protested that he thought it was only cheating if someone copied on an exam. He was wrong. Since the student had written two other papers for the class himself, it was clear that he knew very well what it meant to write a paper that was not an exam.

Furthermore, IGNORANCE OF THE HONOR CODE IS NOT A FACTOR IN DETERMINING WHETHER PLAGIARISM HAS BEEN COMMITTED.

2. Plagiarized passages incorporated into the student's writing.

The Plagiarism: Another student working on the same assignment chose to write about the language of the "rave" phenomenon. He copied material from a number of websites, pasting single phrases, whole sentences, passages, and whole paragraphs into his paper. Though course materials had specifically instructed students to use signal phrases to introduce all material from other sources, to use MLA-style in-text citations, and to provide a references page, the student did none of these things.

The Detection: At first the teacher was pleased to see that, after an awkward beginning, the student seemed to warm to his topic and began to write some well-crafted, almost poetic sentences describing the rave experience.

"Nothing like writing from experience!" she thought. "Great metaphor!" she wrote in the margin.

However, the illusion soon broke down, and the teacher felt cheated. It took about half an hour of web-searching, but the teacher found the sources from which the student had taken material and patched it into his own prose without acknowledging any of it.

The Judgment: The student protested that he had not intended to cheat but had waited too long to start writing the paper. He had meant to "go back and put in the citations" but had run out of time.

His claim was not accepted because, in spite of specific instruction, there was not even one attempt to write into the text any kind of "signal phrase" that usually accompanies source material: no "according to" or "in so-and-so's article" or "as so-and-so writes."

Even more importantly, INTENTION IS NOT AN ISSUE IN PLAGIARISM. If others' material is submitted or published as the writer's own, then plagiarism has been committed, whether through carelessness, ignorance, or haste.

These two students damaged their integrity, their grades, their scholastic records, their own learning, and the trust of the academic community by plagiarizing.