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Plagarizing
Bethel School District students should seek to be totally honest in all their dealings. They should complete their own work and be evaluated based upon that work. They should not engage in any form of academic dishonesty or misconduct including, but not limited to, plagiarism, fabrication or falsification, cheating, and other academic misconduct.
Plagiarism is the deliberate or inadvertent act of representing the words, ideas, or data of another as one’s own without providing proper attribution to the author through quotation, reference, or footnote. This can be in the form of verbatim copying, paraphrasing, or in any way taking another’s work as your own.
Fabrication or Falsification is a form of dishonesty where a student invents or distorts the origin or content of information used as authority.
Cheating is a form of dishonesty where a student attempts to give the appearance of a level of knowledge or skill that has not been obtained. Examples include copying from another person’s work, allowing someone to copy from you, using tools or resources not allowed, working with another person when not allowed, or doing another person’s work for them.
Other Academic Misconduct includes other academically dishonest, deceitful, or inappropriate acts which are intentionally committed. Examples include inappropriately providing or receiving information or academic work so as to gain unfair advantage over others, changing grades, stealing copies of tests, etc.
What Is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s words or ideas as if they were your own, without giving credit to the author or source. The Internet has made it very easy to find papers on a variety of topics. But before you even think about borrowing someone else’s work and trying to pass it off as your own, remember that it is as easy for your teacher to find that paper as it was for you! And teachers can usually recognize whether a student has or has not written a paper, because they are familiar with your authorial “voice” and your skill as a writer. Anyway, if you don’t do your own work, you never learn anything, and what’s the point?
In some cases, there may be a fine line between information that you know already, from past reading and classes, and information that you’ve taken from a source. For example, if you’ve spent the school year learning about the Egyptians and you present general information that you’ve learned during the course of the year using your own words, you’re not committing plagiarism. You’re presenting information that’s a part of your own general knowledge. But if you have taken that information out of a book (or from some other source, including the Internet), you have to give credit to the authors by using a citation, regardless of whether you put the information from your textbook in your own words or quoted material directly from your source.
That doesn’t mean that your papers should just be one string of quotes after another! Nor should you just repeat what the author said without any original thoughts of your own--you should present your own ideas about the material you’re discussing, giving reasons why you agree or disagree with the author, for example. Effective writing--whether its a research report, book report, or something else--combines research with original thinking!
There are some easy ways of avoiding plagiarizing someone else’s work inadvertently, which are discussed below.
Taking Notes
It’s very easy to simply copy words out of a book and then later forget that you did so and present the work as your own. The problem is that whether it’s an accident or not, it’s still plagiarism! To avoid this, you should:
- Read through the material first, and then write down from memory the information you remember. This serves a couple of purposes. First, it ensures that you just write down what you remember to be the most important and interesting facts. Second, it forces you to summarize the author’s points in your own words.
- When taking notes, get in the habit of paraphrasing. Paraphrasing means to put things into your own words. Remember, though, that even if you put what you read into your own words, you still have to give credit where credit is due when the ideas you are expressing are not your own original ideas!
- Use quotation marks when you use someone else’s words exactly, and tell where you got the information from. See the sections on using quotations, citations, and bibliographies, below.
- Use note cards and captions when taking notes so that you can easily categorize your information. This is often a good way to help you outline the structure of your paper and find relevant information easily.
Using Quotations
If you are going to use another writer’s words exactly, you must use quotation marks. Failing to do so may give your reader the impression that the words and ideas are your own--again, this is plagiarism. But writing involves more than just stringing someone else’s words together with a few words of your own. Effective writing uses a combination of paraphrasing, quoting, and original thinking to present and comment on someone else’s words and ideas. If your paper is just one long string of quotations, take another look. Figure out ways to paraphrase the information that the author presents and, most important, make sure that you contribute some of your own ideas about what the author has to say--whether you agree or disagree and why; other knowledge that you have that seems relevant to your topic; and your feelings about what the author has to say.
Citations and Bibliographies
When you quote passages or use ideas from a source document, whether it’s a book, article, web page, speech, or any other type of original work, you must give credit to the author and work by using citations. A citation informs your reader about the origin of the information you are using in your paper. There are two kinds of citations, generally: in-text citations (usually a shortened reference to the source material) and a bibliographic citation (the full reference, which includes information such as the author(s) name(s), the title of the book or the title of the article and the publication in which it appeared, the publisher, the date of publication, and the pages used.) Citations of different kinds of sources may include other information as well--for example, journal and magazine references often include the volume number and/or issue number; web site citations should include the URL (that is, the www. address of the page) and the date that you accessed the web page.
There are different styles that writers use in listing citations. Some examples (see the links below) include the Modern Language Association (MLA) style, Turabian style, and The Chicago Manual of Style. The style used below conforms to The Chicago Manual of Style. Ask your teacher if he or she has a style that they would prefer for you to use. The links below lead to guides to help you create citations using several different styles.
References in Text (the Author-Date System)
The author-date system of citations is one of the easiest methods to follow. Very simply, when you paraphrase an author or use a quotation from a source, put the author and the date that the book, article, or other source was published in parentheses following the quote or information. Sometimes you will put the author and the date in parentheses (Example 1); other times you will mention the author in a sentence and follow the name with a date in parentheses (Example 2).
- Example 1: In 1895, Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, began a comprehensive study of naval strategies (Chance 1980).
- Example 2: In his book, All Hands on Deck: A Look at the Navy, Alan Chance (1980) discusses the role of the navy in American history.
- Example 3 (using a magazine article, which goes in quotation marks rather than italics): The article, “TR: True Grit,” states that Roosevelt frequently encouraged his boss to take vacations, leaving the young Roosevelt in charge of the Department of the Navy (Pauling 2000).
If there is more than one author, list all of the authors by their last names, followed by the date:
- Example: The monarch butterflies appear to be negatively affected by the use of genetically modified crops (MacMurray, Pierce, and Logan 2000).
Sometimes we may not know the author; in that case we would write the name of the organization that issued the publication.
- Example: There has been “a serious decline in the interest and involvement of the general public in the electoral process over the past few decades” (The League of Women Voters 1999).
If the material is taken from a web page, use the examples above as a guide.
- Example: Word for Windows is the most widely used word processing program (Microsoft Corporation 1998).
Bibliography/Works Cited
A bibliography lists in alphabetical order (by author’s last name or, if there is no author, the name of the organization) all of the sources you used in your paper and cited using the author-date system.
In general, full references for a book include the author’s name (or authors’ names), the title of the book (in italics), the city of publication, the name of the publishing company, the year of publication (in parentheses), and, if only a portion of the book was used, the page numbers.
For a magazine article, include the name of the author or authors, the title of the article (in quotation marks), the title of the magazine (in italics), the date of the magazine (month and year), and the page numbers of the citation.
For a web page, give the author and/or organization that created it (if known), the title of the page or article, the Internet address, and the date that you accessed the web page.
If we pretend that the examples in this section all came from the same paper, our bibliography, which would go on a separate page following our paper, would look like this:
Bibliography
Chance, Alan S. All Hands on Deck: A Look at the Navy. New York: Made Up Publishing Co. (1980): 122-145.
League of Women Voters, The. Get out the Vote. Los Angeles: LWV Publishing (1999).
MacMurray, Lloyd R., Alan Pierce, and Michael V. Logan. “A King-Sized Problem: The Decline of the Monarch Butterfly.” Green Guide, Spring 1999, 21-25. [Notice that only the first author is listed last name/first name; the others are listed first names before last names.]
Microsoft Corporation. “Word for Windows--Overview.” Microsoft Users’ Guide. http://www.microsoft.com/made_up_page.htm. Accessed on April 1, 2001.
Pauling, Michele M. “TR: True Grit.” American Presidents Magazine, April 1997, 66-77.
These examples cover many of the types of sources you are likely to use in writing research papers. The links below contain examples of both similar and additional citations, along with examples of how to do citations using other styles. Remember to check with your teachers to see if they have a preferred style of citations, and remember to be consistent overall, regardless of which style you use.
Links
The BCC Writing Series - Good discussion of plagiarism, using quotations and paraphrasing, with examples of appropriate paraphrasing techniques.
Purdue Research - Modern Language Associations style for formatting papers and citing resources. Has examples of a ‘Works Cited’ section (bibliography) and the author-page style of in-text citations.
MLA Citations Handout - Good reference when citing material in the text or in a bibliography. This was taken from Anne Bennett at Graham-Kapowsin High School.