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What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism can be unintentional or intentional when ideas, text, and creative work are used
but not cited in academic, professional, and personal work. Common forms of plagiarism can include:

  • Passing off another’s ideas or work as your own
  • Fabricating citations
  • Copying, cutting and pasting without citing the original source
  • Paraphrasing incorrectly
  • Using media files, such as image, audio or video files, without citing them

How will you know if something is common knowledge? Consider:

  1. Can it be found in many different places?
  2. Is it widely known by a lot of different people?

Use your common sense — when in doubt, ask!

When Do You Cite?

When to cite decision chart. Did you think of it? If yes, do not cite it. If not, is it common knowledge? If yes, do not cite it. If no, cite it.

4 Steps to Successful Paraphrasing

  1. Read the entire text, underlining key points and main ideas.

  2. In your own words, write a sentence about the main idea of the text (i.e. summarize). Also, write key points in the text.

  3. Highlight any words, phrases, or key passages that you would want to quote directly.

  4. Combine the above into a new paraphrased paragraph, using your own words.