Unit 2: Plagiarism

Safe Practices

1. No citation is needed for this paragraph, because it’s a personal life experience.

2. The passage is not cited properly. It looks like a word-for-word quotation. I would put this paragraph into quotation marks, create the brief reference to the source “The Preamble to the US Constitution” (in-text citation) and showed the source as a full bibliographic citation in Bibliography.

3. This passage is statistics and has to be cited with brief reference to the source and with full bibliographic citation in Bibliography.

4. This passage is paraphrased but still need to be cited.

5.  The words taken from the original text are in quotation marks and it is correct. As for the in-text citation it’s supposed to be a brief reference to the source, like: (King, para. 5). The name of the document has to be mentioned in bibliography.

6. In this paragraph the citation is used correctly, because the name of the document and the author are mentioned in the context and the word-for-word citation is in quotation marks. But there is one concern about missing words in the quotation: “I am sorry to say”. May be it would be more accurate to insert “…” in the place of this words.

7. This passage is accurate. It mentioned the author of the information, obtained from the conversation.

8. It’s a common knowledge, but mention the Constitution of the USA as a source would carry more weight.

Summary about Plagiarism

Either in school or at the workplace we need to be careful with information we are going to use to avoid plagiarism because of the ethical and legal issues. We plagiarize if we use somebody’s ideas or words and present them as our own. To avoid plagiarism we need:

·         Put into quotation marks another person’s words (direct quotation)

·         Acknowledge the source if we paraphrase somebody’s thoughts

·         Credit the source for any chart, diagram, picture, or audio- video materials

We don’t need to credit if:

·         We use our own personal experience, observation, thoughts, argument, or conclusion

·         We use our own art materials

·         The information we present is a common knowledge or generally-accepted fact.

Sometimes it is hard to decide if it’s a common knowledge or the fact. If we in doubt, check on the Internet if the “information is undocumented in at least five credible sources.” (Stoley)[1]

Making the research about plagiarism I've learned that, anyway, it’s better to cite if you are not sure about the information. We always have to be accurate using somebody's words or thoughts like with any private property.

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[1] Karl Stolley, Allen Brizee.OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab. Is It Plagiarism Yet?