Workshop Goals
- Encourage students to develop their identities as part of the college community.
- Empower students to make informed choices about using and citing sources.
Learning Outcomes
- Define and recognize the 5 common types of plagiarism.
- Learn about strategies to reduce the likelihood of plagiarism during the research and writing process.
- Create in-text citations.
- Learn about references and citation formats.
- Self-evaluate past work for unintentional plagiarism and plan how to self-correct for future work.
Purpose of this Workshop
A lot of students cheat and plagiarize without really knowing it’s wrong or without knowing why it’s wrong. The purpose of this workshop is to clear up and correct misunderstandings about cheating, including plagiarism, in college classes.
Plagiarism in particular is confusing for most writers and it’s explained in the Coastline Student Code of Conduct that you can get an F for an assignment or a class if your professor finds that you have plagiarized even if you did not do it on purpose. Some students get so worried about plagiarizing that they want to stop using sources in their essays, but that is not a good solution, since in most of your college essays your professors will expect you to show that you have taught yourself about the topic and you are engaging in a written dialogue with the scholars who have written about your topic before.
How this Works
What you will be asked to do:
In this workshop you will read explanations about avoiding plagiarism and citing sources. This workbook is yours to keep. We encourage you to take notes on the pages of this workbook as you read so that you practice explaining these ideas in your own words and they become part of your knowledge-base. We have provided space in the margins and blank pages at the end to ensure you have places to write your notes.
There will be an opportunity for you to assess your own learning about plagiarism and to reflect on what you have learned. Some courses might require or encourage students to do this workshop for credit and to get credit you will need to send the Summative Activity to the librarians. If you are doing the workshop on your own and you want feedback from the librarians, then you will complete and submit the Summative Activity. To submit the Summative Activity, you will write your answers on the sheets provided, remove the sheets from the packet, and mail them to the librarians.
Tips for successfully completing this workshop:
- Read and take notes.
- Write down questions you have as you’re reading.
- Do the self-assessments, check your answers, reflect on your strengths, re-read the sections where your self-assessment scores show that you need review.
- Complete the Summative Activity and mail it to the library.
- When you get feedback from the librarians, read it and keep a record of the corrections they sent you so you can use them to improve your work and avoid plagiarism in the future.
We expect that this workshop will take at least a few hours to complete.
What the librarians will do:
The librarians have created this workshop to give you the tools you need to have a strong foundation when using resources in your assignments. We know that you don’t want to plagiarize your assignments but it can be challenging to know all the detailed rules, especially when your professors assume you already know the “rules” and don’t take time to explain them. If you decide to mail the Coastline Library your Summative Activity answers, librarians will score your answers, write back to you with specific feedback about any errors so that you can update your understanding of plagiarism and citing sources, and will answer the questions you still have at the end of the workshop. We will also keep track of the fact that you completed the workshop so that you don’t have to do it more than once if you have professors in the future who will give you credit for it if you are a Coastline Student.
We have also cited all of our sources in this workshop and included a Works Cited page so that you can see how we apply the rules that we are teaching you. This workshop uses MLA 9th edition citation format except where we are explaining APA citation format rules, which is APA version 7. There will be more information about these two citation formats in the workshop, so if you are not familiar with them yet, you will be able to learn by looking at the examples.
Note: This is the first version of this workshop book that we have made, so there are probably some typos and other errors that we missed when we proof-read it 12 times. We apologize for those errors and hope that they do not interfere with the clarity or usefulness of this book. If you notice major errors or have any questions, please note them on the Summative Activity sheets that you send back to us so that we can make improvements in the next edition. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
About the Sources We’re Using in This Lesson
A lot of the research source examples we’re using in this workshop are licensed under a Creative Commons License, so you will see notes about Attribution, NonCommercial, and ShareAlike. These notes indicate the different permissions that the authors have granted to people to re-use their work. Normally information is protected by copyright, so we would need to ask an author’s permission to use long excerpts of their work. But the Creative Commons Licenses tell us that we are allowed to re-use as long as we:
Give Attribution: That means we have to say where we got the work from and what Creative Commons License it has. The symbol for it is CC-BY.
Only Use it for NonCommercial Purposes: That means we can’t print our own version of their work and sell it at a profit. The symbol for it is CC-BY-NC.
Continue to ShareAlike: That means that we have to share what we make from it so that other people can re-use our work. The symbol for it is CC-BY-SA.
If you use sources with Creative Commons Licenses in your own essays, you still have to cite them to give credit to the creators. You will learn more about citing sources in this workshop.
