English/Composition

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is using others ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information.

In college courses, we are continually engaged with other people's ideas, we read them in text, hear them in lectures, discuss them in class and incorporate them into our own writing. As a result it is very important that we give them credit where it is due.

How to Avoid Plagiarism?

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use:

  • another person's ideas, opinion, or theory
  • any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings (any piece of information) that are not common knowledge
  • quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words
  • paraphrase of another person's spoken or written words

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