Students: Top 10 strategies to avoid plagiarism
1. Never use words written by friends or passages from books as your own. Your friends and others have worked through their ideas on their own. It’s hard work. Don’t steal their hard work. That’s not fair.
2. Always include references for direct quoting, for paraphrasing, and for summarizing. All three strategies are useful in research paper writing. But you must always give credit where credit is due. Keep track of ALL your sources. You might photocopy your source material so that you don’t have to go back to the library or look for work online again.
3. Always quote and reference a key word that isn’t commonly found in other resources. And when you use three or more successive words from any source, quote and reference the quote too. Otherwise, you are intentionally plagiarizing by passing off others’ work as your own.
4. Never just substitute your words for someone else’s words and call it your work. It’s the thinking behind the ideas that you need to experience, not the practice at using a thesaurus.
5. Never use the syntax and organization of ideas in an article as if you came up with the form. It takes a lot to come up with a persuasive argument or structure of an essay. If you borrow that structure without referencing it, you are stealing.
6. Never plagiarize yourself. You can refer to papers you have previously written or published. You can even quote yourself. But never copy/paste previous writing and present it as if it’s new. To do so is to deceive your instructors.
7. Never buy or copy a paper or section of a paper from the Internet. Teachers read thousands of drafts every semester. Besides: you’re at school to learn rather than just to produce a product.
8. Always take accurate notes. Include quotation marks, include complete bibliographic references, include page numbers, and point out to yourself if you are paraphrasing or summarizing. The idea with note taking is to save you time later. The content should be content you might use. But you can’t use it without plagiarizing if you can’t correctly reference it. You might consider creating an annotated bibliography or keeping a list of URLs so that you can go back to them later if needed.
9. Always plan your time. Writing takes time, especially if it involves research. Good note taking takes time. If you procrastinate, then you give yourself less time and make plagiarism appear to be a viable option. It is never an option. Don’t procrastinate.
10. Always make writing personally meaningful. Even if the topic seems mundane, there is a way to make it meaningful to you. If you think through what makes the topic meaningful, you will not want to steal other people’s ideas. This will take time. But you will want to learn more and come up with your own ideas.
Instructors: Top 10 strategies to help your students avoid plagiarism
1. Always teach the importance of academic integrity and intellectual property rights. Make allusions to the worlds of video, music, and software where such stealing is “piracy.”
2. Teach the importance of distinguishing between your ideas and the ideas of your sources.
3. Always point out the importance of following formatting conventions in American culture. In some countries, if you purchase a book you can quote from it without referencing it. And in some countries, educated writers are expected to include information from and about important people and figures without necessarily documenting the sources. But in the U.S. that’s called plagiarism.
4. Always use assignments that are personally meaningful for students. If students find assignments engaging, then they will have less reason to plagiarize. You might consider the “I-Search” paper that combines personal expression and experience with more traditional fact gathering. The more understanding students have about a topic, the less tempted they will be to plagiarize. And if you demonstrate your expectations you’ll have more success. See the University of Toronto’s Strategies for Deterring Plagiarism for some very useful tips.
5. Always teach good note-taking skills and emphasize why students should include referencing in their notes. Students might be encouraged to photocopy or download information offline to keep track of sources.
6. Always teach the difference between summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quoting. Summarizing is including the main points of an author in your own words but without including personal commentary or interpretation. Paraphrasing should include the student’s perspective and be more extensive than a summary. Be sure to point out that the student should not substitute synonyms for the author’s writing. Many students do not understand the rules for quoting and parenthetical notation, or do not know that they might quote all of the exact words of a sentence, part of a sentence, or omit words from the sentence. Students might practice summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quoting.
7. Always break down assignments into multiple components so that students have an investment in the content of their learning rather than just trying to win points for following the directions of an assignment.
8. Always point out to students that statistics obtained from sources must be documented. If the students didn’t count the number of people who died from cancer last year one by one themselves, the information came from a source and needs documentation.
9. Always tell students to re-read their papers before submitting and to ask, “Is it clear which ideas and words are mine and which come from my sources?” This is especially important with paraphrasing.
10. Always discuss what is “common knowledge” (e.g., President Bush is the current President of the United States) and what requires documentation (e.g., a quote from an interview with President Bush).
