PLAGIARISM
For another's
words: use quotes
For another's
ideas: use citation
Plagiarism occurs when a
person attempts to pass off as his/her own, ideas or words of another. This is not acceptable behavior, it is
severely punished by professional societies (usually in informal ways like
ostracism), and there are strong formal sanctions against it at UNI (see UNI
Catalog “Academic Regulations: Academic Ethics Policies”).
In your written work for
this course, plagiarism would occur if you used someone else's specific and
identifiable ideas without saying it was his or her idea (which misleads
by implying it was your idea).
The other person might be your roommate, a person who has already taken
this course and completed the assignments, or the author of a journal article.
Or, plagiarism would
occur if you used phrases and/or longer passages taken from a written source
verbatim (word for word). These should
be enclosed in quotation marks to avoid plagiarism.* Words and whole phrases used as technical terms are not
put in quotations since there is no danger the reader will think you invented
these, unless you explicitly say you did.
In any case, the source
of quoted material, technical term, or idea should be make clear (i.e., by
using the standard citation forms you will learn later). Often, however, the source of an idea or
technical term is given only the first time it appears. The reader will assume that subsequent uses
are from the given source. (There is
rarely any need to repeat quoted material.)
These complicated rules
can be summarized in a simple way: If
the reader is likely to assume something is yours when it is not, then use
citations and quotation marks to make the source clear. Use common sense to avoid misleading the
reader. For example, if you are
annotating or summarizing an article you have just cited, then the reader will
obviously assume the ideas expressed are not yours, unless you indicate
otherwise at some point. The reader will
assume the ideas are in your own words, unless you use quotes. The exception to this is that the reader
will assume that technical terms and phrases are straight from the article,
since you aren't expected to invent these when summarizing something. So you would not need to enclose such terms
in quotes to avoid misleading the reader.
In practice, a problem
with plagiarism arises only when a student tries to take a short-cut in
completing an assignment by deliberately plagiarizing words or ideas from
another student's work or from a printed source. When this is detected, two things happen:
1. The student
receives an automatic F for the work
2. The student is
reported to the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs for
disciplinary action.
*Quotations are rarely
needed for the kind of writing you will do in this course. Don't use them, since paraphrasing the
author usually works just as well.