Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [193]
Knowing what plagiarism is, however, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll know how to avoid it. Is it okay, for example, to cobble together a series of summaries and paraphrases in a paragraph, provided you include the authors in a bibliography at the end of the paper? Or how about if you insert a single footnote at the end of the paragraph? The answer is that both are still plagiarism because your reader can’t tell where your thinking starts and others’ thinking stops. As a basic rule of thumb, readers must be able to distinguish your contribution from that of your sources, and exactly which information came from which source.
WHY DOES PLAGIARISM MATTER?
A recent survey indicated that 53 percent of Who’s Who High Schoolers thought that plagiarism was no big deal (Sally Cole and Elizabeth Kiss, “What Can We Do About Student Cheating?” About Campus, May–June 2000, p. 6). So why should institutions of higher learning care about it? Here are two great reasons:
Plagiarism poisons the environment. Students who don’t cheat are alienated by students who do and get away with it, and faculty can become distrustful of students and even disillusioned about teaching when constantly driven to track down students’ sources. It’s a lot easier, by the way, than most students think for faculty to recognize language and ideas that are not the student’s own. And now there are all those search engines provided by firms like Turnitin.com that have been generated in response to the Internet paper-mill boom. Who wants another cold war?
Plagiarism defeats the purpose of going to college, which is learning how to think. You can’t learn to think by just copying others’ ideas; you need to learn to trust your own intelligence. Students’ panic about deadlines and their misunderstandings about assignments sometimes spur plagiarism. It’s a good bet that your professors would much rather take requests for help and give extra time on assignments than have to go through the anguish of confronting students about plagiarized work.
So, plagiarism gets in the way of trust, fairness, intellectual development, and, ultimately, the attitude toward learning that sets the tone for a college or university community.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQS) ABOUT PLAGIARISM
Is it still plagiarism if I didn’t intentionally copy someone else’s work and present it as my own; that is, if I plagiarized it by accident?
Yes, it is still plagiarism. Colleges and universities put the burden of responsibility on students for knowing what plagiarism is and then making the effort necessary to avoid it. Leaving out the quotation marks around someone else’s words or omitting the attribution after a summary of someone else’s theory may be just a mistake—a matter of inadequate documentation—but faculty can only judge what you turn in to them, not what you intended.
If I include a list of works consulted at the end of my paper, doesn’t that cover it? No. A works-cited list (bibliography) tells your readers what you read but leaves them in the dark about how and where this material has been used in your paper. Putting one or more references at the end of a paragraph containing source material is a version of the same problem. The solution is to cite the source at the point that you quote or paraphrase or summarize it. To be even clearer about what comes from where, also use what are called in-text attributions. See the next FAQ on these.
What is the best way to help my readers distinguish between what my sources are saying and what I’m saying?
Be overt. Tell your