  
What is
Plagiarism?
Both teachers and students are aware that writing from a source is not an
easy task. As a result, plagiarism is most likely to occur in this
type of writing assignment. However, being aware of what is considered
plagiarism can help you avoid this situation.
Objectives
In this section, you will learn to identify:
- Different forms of plagiarism.
Forms of Plagiarism
Plagiarism takes many shapes and forms.
A recent publication, Doing Research: The Complete Research Paper Guide,
listed these examples of plagiarism.
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- 'Borrowing' a friend's paper
- Downloading a paper from the Internet
- Turning in a paper without any
documentation
- Turning in a paper with in-text
citations but no Works Cited (bibliography) page--or the other way
around
- Copying passages from a source without
putting the passages within quotation marks and citing them
- Documenting only quoted material but
not documenting paraphrased material
- Retaining too much of the wording and
style of the original in paraphrasing
- Placing in-text citation at the end of
a long passages without making clear how much of the passage is from
the source (Seylor
114)
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Summary
Plagiarism can take many forms in college
writing—anything from “borrowing” a paper to incorrectly documenting
sources. But, because writing from sources is so difficult, plagiarism most
often occurs in this type of writing assignment. Students may pick up too
many of the writer’s phrases. As a rule of thumb, five of the writer’s
words in a row constitute plagiarism of another persons ’s words. Students may also
fail to give the writer’s ideas the credit they are due. We often think of
plagiarism as copying another person’s words, but presentation of another’s ideas
without acknowledgement is plagiarism as well. Click on Forms of
Plagiarism to learn why accidental and intentional plagiarism occur.
Created by: Marilyn Bauer and Jacie Moriyama for Leeward Community College
Last Updated:
November 1, 2004
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