Students’ comments in the online version of this Avoiding Plagiarism Library Workshop have told us that the following tips have really helped them to avoid plagiarism. We offer 6 suggestions for doing your research and preparing your essay draft that will make it very unlikely that you’ll plagiarize without meaning to do it:
- Take Notes During Your Research
- Paraphrase the Right Way
- Write an Outline
- Mark the Boundaries of the Information You are Using
- Cite All Your Sources
- Use Tutoring or Peer Assistance
In the sections below, we will explain how to carry out each of these suggestions and how they work together to help you avoid plagiarism.
Take Notes During Your Research
Because of the way the human brain works, it’s nearly impossible to read a source and then immediately write about it without accidentally plagiarizing its structure, ideas, or even exact words. When we read something, we often feel like we had the idea ourselves and it’s only by putting some time between when we read a source and when we write about it that we can reliably avoid plagiarizing. One way to prevent accidental plagiarism is to stop researching before beginning a first draft of an essay.
But how will you remember what you read so that you can use it when you write your essay? The best way is to take carefully formatted notes while you are reading your research sources. These notes are different from the notes you take when you want to remember what you read in your textbook to prepare for an exam. In your research notes the most important thing is to record the author and title of the source and to clearly show the difference between
a. what came from the source and
b. the ideas you had while you were reading the source.
To achieve these goals, we recommend a note-taking system called PQC.
P stands for Paraphrases, where you explain the ideas you like from the source in your own words and record the page number or range of pages where you read the idea. When you are paraphrasing, it is best to write the paraphrase without looking at the source you read. Just read the passage you want to make a note about a few times, then close the source and write what you understand about it in your own words and in your own order. You can even start to reframe the information you are paraphrasing so that you are emphasizing the information from the original source that is the most important for your argument or focus.
Q stands for Quotes and these should be put between quotation marks in your notes so you remember that you copied the exact words from the research source. You will also have to record the page number where you found each quote.
C stands for Comments and these are a really important part of your notes that a lot of people forget to record. As you are reading, you are probably thinking about your own opinions on the topic, other things you have read, how what you are reading relates to the assignment instructions, and the new questions that you’re thinking of as you read your sources. The comments you record in your notes can lead to excellent analysis in your essay or to further research before you start writing. Many people think they will remember the comments that come into their mind as they are reading, but usually these new ideas are fleeting because they are not yet connected to a lot of the other knowledge you already have. By noticing them and writing them down as soon as you have these new ideas, you will come up with what you really want to write about in your essay.
Taking notes using the PQC format will save you from accidentally plagiarizing because you can write your outline or even your essay from your notes instead of having to go back to the original source and unintentionally soak up that author’s way of seeing things again when you are trying to write your ideas in your own way. And it will also make it easy to show clear boundaries in your essay between your ideas and your sources because the boundaries are already made clear in your notes.
This is an example of how we recommend organizing your notes as you are reading your research sources:
The text version of the Example of PQC Notes image is in the Appendix.
Keep Your Sources, Too
Even though you will have very complete notes by using the PQC method and we recommend writing from your notes instead of from the original sources, you still have to keep the copies of the articles and websites you collected. It’s likely that even very complete notes could be missing some important details for your citations. So don’t throw away your source materials. Keep them in case you need them when you are double checking your citations before you submit your essay.
Paraphrase the Right Way
The most common way you will incorporate sources into your essays is by explaining the ideas in your own words. As we explained above, you still have to cite your source even if you do the work of paraphrasing it. If you change the words of the original source but you don’t cite it, you’re doing Find-Replace plagiarism. But even if you cite the source you’re paraphrasing, you can still be considered to be plagiarizing if you keep too many of the same words or the same structure from the original source. Taking notes carefully will show you what are your own words that you are using to explain your research sources and what words you have copied from the source. In your notes, you can also begin the process of changing the structure of the information you are paraphrasing so that you will not end up presenting the information in the same order that it was presented in the original.
Read the Research Source Excerpt below and then read the two examples of paraphrasing.
Sample Passage from an essay by Patrick Nunnally, a lecturer at the University of Minnesota:
For the National Park Service (NPS) to create genuine collaboration with Indigenous communities, it will have to acknowledge that many of the iconic large Western parks were created specifically through the violent removal of Indigenous populations. The NPS uses the term “civic engagement” to address the concept that parks are sites for complex stories about issues in the country’s past that are still vexed, controversial. Many traditional park users seek a triumphalist narrative at NPS sites, where conflict and difficulty are all located in the distant past, and where it all turns out well in the end. Increasingly, parks are resisting the pressure to tell safe simple stories, sometimes by developing new interpretation at longstanding sites, and sometimes by bringing into the system new sites, such as Manzanar National Historic Site, a California location of a World War II-era Japanese internment camp. As the NPS brings American Indians back into the national story that it tells in the parks, that effort opens the way for inclusion to become the default mode for understanding the populations of the country.
The excerpt by Nunnally is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The MLA citation for the research source is:
Nunnally, Patrick. “National Parks: Can ‘America’s Best Idea’ Adjust to the Twenty-First Century?” Open Rivers, no. 7, Summer 2017. doi: 10.24926/2471190X.3161.
Read the following examples of Unacceptable and Acceptable ways that a student could use information from the Sample Passage above. In the first Unacceptable Paraphrase example, we have put the copied phrases from the research source in bold so you can see where they have been used without quotation marks that should mark the boundaries between the student’s own words and the words from the source.
Student Paraphrase example 1 — Unacceptable paraphrase: Same words and structure
According to Patrick Nunnally, a scholar of river life, the National Park Service (NPS) can create genuine collaboration with Indigenous communities by acknowledging that many of the iconic large Western parks were created through the violent removal of Native populations. The NPS calls their collaborations with American Indians “civic engagement” and these are part of the NPS effort to address the complex stories about the country’s past that are still controversial. This may not be what many traditional park users seek, since they probably prefer a positive narrative at NPS sites, where conflict and difficulty are all in the distant past and everything turns out well in the end. The NPS, instead, are developing new interpretations at longstanding sites and as the NPS brings American Indians’ experiences back into the history that it tells in the parks, I argue that effort opens the way for inclusion to become the commonly accepted mode for understanding the true story of the country.
If you’re interested to see what this unacceptable paraphrase would look like if it were correctly formatted to avoid plagiarism by adding quotation marks around exact phrases and including in-text citations, go to the Appendix section titled “Examples from Paraphrase the Right Way”.
Now, read another Unacceptable paraphrase and notice how it is still similar to the original Sample Passage for a Research Source above even though the words have been changed and the student even mentions the author of the source they’re using.
Student Paraphrase example 2 — Unacceptable paraphrase: Different words, same structure
According to Patrick Nunnally, a scholar of river life, the National Park Service (NPS) can generate true cooperation with Native peoples by acknowledging that many of the largest and most popular national parks in the Western US were only possible because the US government violently removed Indigenous populations from the land. The NPS calls their collaborations with American Indians “civic engagement” and these are part of the NPS effort to address our country’s complicated history, though there is controversy about the stories (Nunnally). This may not be what is desired by typical park visitors, since they probably prefer a positive narrative at NPS sites, where war and struggle are all in the far past and everything ends well (Nunnally). Instead of telling a sanitized story with a happy ending, though, the NPS is offering updated versions of the history of established parks and as the NPS adds acknowledgement of Native Americans’ circumstances in the story that it recounts about the sites (Nunnally). I argue that what the NPS is doing to highlight the true history is a step in the right direction to make these discussions more common and part of everyone’s knowledge about the history of the United States.
Here we have a side-by-side comparison of the sentences from the Nunnally essay and Student Paraphrase Example 2 to show how similar the structures of the two paragraphs are. It might not be super obvious, but the student is mimicking the tone and “voice” of the original author. In our essays, we develop our own voice and when we closely mimic the original source, that stands out clearly to professors. They notice that we have plagiarized by not doing a thorough job of paraphrasing to explain a source in our own voice and integrate the ideas into our own knowledge of the topic we are writing about.
The change in tone or voice that happens when we plagiarize instead of thoroughly paraphrasing is one of the signs that professors look for when they are checking for plagiarism in their students’ work. Changing words but not the structure of a source is a subtle type of plagiarism, but it is still plagiarism and it happens when students do not yet deeply understand the sources they are using in their essays.
After reviewing the table below where the sentences from the Nunnally essay and the Paraphrase Example 2 are compared side-by-side, you will see in Example 3 below how it looks when a student changes both the words and the structure to do a thorough paraphrase that avoids plagiarism and uses the student’s own voice.
|
Sentence number |
Sentences from the Nunnally essay |
Sentences from Student Paraphrase Example 2 |
Notes: why this could be plagiarism of same structure |
|
1 |
For the National Park Service (NPS) to create genuine collaboration with Indigenous communities, it will have to acknowledge that many of the iconic large Western parks were created specifically through the violent removal of Indigenous populations. |
According to Patrick Nunnally, a scholar of river life, the National Park Service (NPS) can generate true cooperation with Native peoples by acknowledging that many of the largest and most popular national parks in the Western US were only possible because the US government violently removed Indigenous populations from the land. |
These two sentences make the same point about the purpose of acknowledging the violent history of the creation of national parks. |
|
2 |
The NPS uses the term “civic engagement” to address the concept that parks are sites for complex stories about issues in the country’s past that are still vexed, controversial. |
The NPS calls their collaborations with American Indians “civic engagement” and these are part of the NPS effort to address our country’s complicated history, though there is controversy about the stories (Nunnally). |
The next sentence in the research source and the student example defines civic engagement. |
|
3 |
Many traditional park users seek a “triumphalist” narrative at NPS sites, where conflict and difficulty are all located in the distant past, and where “it all turns out well in the end.” |
This may not be what is desired by typical park visitors, since they probably prefer a positive narrative at NPS sites, where war and struggle are all in the far past and everything ends well (Nunnally). |
The third sentence in both paragraphs is about how a true account of the history of the parks may upset some people. |
|
4 |
Increasingly, parks are resisting the pressure to tell safe simple stories, sometimes by developing new interpretation at longstanding sites, and sometimes by bringing into the system new sites, such as Manzanar National Historic Site, a California location of a World War II-era Japanese internment camp. |
Instead of telling a sanitized story with a happy ending, though, the NPS is offering updated versions of the history of established parks and as the NPS adds acknowledgement of Native Americans’ circumstances in the story that it recounts about the sites (Nunnally). |
The fourth sentence emphasizes the type of work that the park workers are doing to change the narrative. The Student Example leaves out the details about Manzanar because they are not relevant to their argument about Indigenous populations. |
|
5 |
As the NPS brings American Indians back into the “national story” that it tells in the parks, that effort opens the way for inclusion to become the default mode for understanding the populations of the country. |
I argue that what the NPS is doing to highlight the true history is a step in the right direction to make these discussions more common and part of everyone’s knowledge about the history of the United States. |
The paragraphs both conclude with a statement about the value that these efforts will have for getting everyone to know the true history. |
The following paraphrase example corrects the problems in Student Paraphrase example 2 by applying the author’s point of view to change the structure of the information in order to emphasize the most important points for the student’s essay in addition to explaining the ideas in the student’s own words. One way to set yourself up for success to paraphrase like this is to follow the earlier suggestion to stop researching and then start writing and to take notes on your sources in your own words.
Paraphrase example 3 — Acceptable paraphrase: Different words and structure
One controversy about national parks in the US is how they are teaching visitors about their true history. People should be able to enjoy the parks and also know the Indigenous cultures that were sacrificed to create them, but many people still hold onto their belief that everything has turned out okay in the long run because the national parks are so important to them (Nunnally). As Patrick Nunnally, a scholar of river life, points out, the connections that the National Park Service (NPS) is building with Indigenous communities can spread discussions about the history and current life of Indigenous nations on the lands now included in the national park system. For a long time Indigenous peoples’ concerns about the NPS have been ignored and the parks have been considered only in a positive light. But now social justice is becoming more common, with critical race theory being used to update the way that history is taught in schools and what Nunally calls the “civic engagement” work being done by NPS is another example of how important it is to acknowledge the past so that the NPS is part of the solution.
What did the writer of the acceptable paraphrase do? They clearly marked the information that came from the original source by placing a citation after paraphrased information, or alternatively, incorporating the source’s author into the narrative, and by placing quotation marks around direct quotes. Remember to mark the boundaries of your paraphrases and quotes so that you distinguish your ideas from the ideas and words you’re getting from your sources. Paraphrase Example 3 is an acceptable paraphrase because the author made it easy for the reader to see where they were using information from Nunnally and where they were explaining their own idea or example. Marking the boundaries clearly protects you from plagiarizing.
Some of the reasons this is an acceptable paraphrase are: the student used synonyms, changed the order of the information to emphasize the point about the controversy, combined some information into a single sentence and broke other information into multiple sentences, and cited the source.
A Note About Finding Synonyms
Synonyms are different words that have the same meaning, like child and kid. Sometimes a thesaurus (which is a book of words with their synonyms listed) or a dictionary can help you to think of synonyms for the words you want to paraphrase, which can support you in your efforts to explain the ideas from the source in your own words. Be careful when using dictionaries and thesauruses, though, because if you choose words you are not extremely familiar with, they can have additional meanings or associations that your professor will find awkward or confusing. Use dictionaries and thesauruses to remind you of words you already know and try to avoid adding words to your essays that are brand new to you unless you learned their meanings from the class you are taking.
Write an Outline that Cites Your Sources
Before you start to seriously draft your essay, we recommend taking the time to outline your body paragraphs. Body paragraphs are all the paragraphs that are not your Introduction or Conclusion. They are where you give evidence to support your claims and use examples to illustrate your ideas.
You can use your PQC notes to help you fill in your outline with details. Your outline should include your main idea or topic sentence for each body paragraph and then list your evidence and examples, including the ones you gathered from the research you did. By listing all of your evidence and examples and citing the ones you got from your research sources you can see where you still have gaps in your research and you can seek out more sources before you even start writing. You can take notes and add the important points from these additional sources to your outline. Adding this step to your research and writing will further protect you from accidentally plagiarizing by doing your reading and writing too close together in time.
Tips for Writing a Research Essay Outline
The following tips are from the textbook University 101: Study, Strategize and Succeed.
As the textbook authors explain, “Each main point [in your outline] will be supported by supporting points and evidence that you have compiled from other sources. Each piece of information from another source must be cited, whether you have quoted directly, paraphrased, or summarized the information.”
This image by Graeme Robinson-Clogg from Kwantlen Polytechnic University shows what an outline should look like:
The text version of the Anatomy of an Outline is in the Appendix.
Mark the Boundaries When Writing Your Draft
It’s a requirement in most college essays to use outside sources in addition to your own ideas and analysis. So you can’t avoid plagiarism by never using anyone else’s ideas. Instead, you have to get good at showing your readers where the “boundaries” are between your ideas and other people’s ideas (Harris 160-164). When these boundaries break down you are in danger of plagiarizing, whether you mean to or not.
The boundaries you mark allow you to differentiate your ideas from the borrowed ideas in your essay. Since you don’t need to mark your own ideas, the boundaries will be marked around the ideas you get from elsewhere. The right way to mark the boundaries of the ideas you get from other sources varies a little depending on what exactly you’re taking from the sources.
There are three main types of boundaries:
Lead-in: this is where you mention the authors of the source including their qualifications for being experts about the topic
Quotation marks or indentation: this is how you show that you are using the exact words directly from the source
In-text citation: this is how you show your reader where they can find the full citation information for the source in your Works Cited page
The scenarios below show the different ways to mark boundaries. They are adapted from The Plagiarism Handbook by Robert A. Harris.
The following research source is used for each of the examples:
Smith, Jordan W., et al. “Attendance Trends Threaten Future Operations of America’s State Park Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 26, June 2019, pp. 12775-12780. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902314116.
This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In case you want to read the excerpts from the research source that are used in these examples, we included them in the Appendix in the section titled “Research Source Excerpts Used in ‘Mark the Boundaries When Writing Your Draft'”.
Read the explanation of each scenario below. These are scenarios that you are likely to experience when you are using research sources in your writing. Each scenario includes an explanation of how to mark the boundaries of a source that you use in the way described. Following the explanation, you will see an example of how it could look in your writing to mark the boundaries of the text you are using from your research sources.
Scenario 1: You are paraphrasing by explaining the ideas you got from a source. But you are not using any of the exact words from the source.
This is the most common way you will use sources in your college essays and you have to show the boundaries around them even though you are explaining them in your own words. Getting into the habit of marking the boundaries of paraphrases and summaries will protect you from a lot of possible plagiarism. It can feel awkward at first, but it gets easier with practice.
Any time you explain someone else’s ideas in your own words, such as in paraphrases and summaries, boundaries have to be marked with a lead-in and an in-text citation.
It will look something like this example from a student essay:
Jordan Smith and his colleagues specializing in recreation and tourism have found that how much it costs for the government to maintain national parks will probably increase by about 800% by 2050 if attendance at national parks keeps growing like it has been (12778). It is not clear if the government will increase funding enough to keep up with how much it costs to protect the health and safety of visitors at national parks.
In the example above, the lead-in to the student’s paraphrase of the source is “Jordan Smith and his colleagues specializing in recreation and tourism have found” and the in-text citation is (12778). The lead-in helps the readers to understand the qualifications of the authors and why they should trust them. Notice in the in-text citation that we do not use Smith, et al. because we mentioned the authors in the lead-in. So the in-text citation only includes 12778, which is the page number where the paraphrased information was located in the research source.
Note: If you are using a source that was never published in print, only online, you may not have a page number. That’s okay. You will include only the information that you do have, which could just be the author’s name or, if you mentioned the author’s name in your lead-in, there would be no additional in-text parenthetical citation if there are no page numbers.
Scenario 2: You are quoting a short phrase, a part of a sentence or 1-2 sentences word-for-word from a source. Note: You should always paraphrase if you can, but if you want to let your reader see it exactly how the original writer said it, then you should quote directly from the source.
The boundaries of the quoted text have to be marked by opening and closing quotation marks and an in-text citation.
It will look something like this example from a student essay:
Funding for park maintenance is so important because it doesn’t just pay for the things that make park visitors have a good experience. It also pays for the high costs to put barriers and paths in place that will “minimize the environmental disturbance visitors can have on natural landscapes and cultural resources,” which the parks were created in the first place to protect (Smith et al. 12775).
In the example above, the sentence contains the student’s own words as well as a quote from the research source. The quotation mark before the word “minimize shows that that’s where the exact words from the research source start. The quotation mark after resources” shows that that is where the exact words from the research source end. The in-text citation is (Smith et al. 12775). This example does not use a lead-in, which is common if you have already introduced the source earlier in your essay.
Scenario 3: You are quoting more than 4 lines word-for-word from a source because there is a long section of it and you want to let your reader see exactly how the writer said it in the original. Note: This is very rare in college essays since you should usually explain ideas from other sources in your own words, but if you are analyzing a passage from a story, for example, you may need to show your reader a big chunk of it so that they know what you are analyzing. If you need to do that, you should follow these guidelines.
The boundaries of the quoted text have to be marked by a lead-in, block indentation of the whole quote, and an in-text citation. Notice that this way of marking a quote is different because it’s a long passage. You don’t use quotation marks for quoting long passages in your essay.
It will look something like this example from a student essay:
Tourism researchers are concerned about the effect that growing attendance will have on national and state parks,
Visitation to parks and protected areas across the United States has increased substantially over the past half-century; despite slight declines in the 1990s and early 2000s, many parks are now experiencing record high visitation. This has led to many well-publicized claims that the nation’s national and state parks are being “loved to death.” Annual visits to the nation’s national parks, for example, increased by 33% from 1984 to 2017. (Smith et al. 12775)
National parks may need to have more restrictions on how many people can use them at a time, but that has to be balanced with the need to make sure all people have equitable access to the parks.
In the example above, the lead-in is the sentence that starts Tourism researchers are concerned… By mentioning their field of expertise, you are preparing your reader to understand why you are quoting from this author. The whole indented section is the quote from the research source. After the indented section is the student’s own conclusion, related to the quote from the research source. Because the writer did not mention the authors by name in the lead-in, the in-text citation is (Smith et al. 12775). Notice that there is no period after the in-text citation because the rules for citing a long passage in the text are different from the rules for normal quotes.
There is another boundary that you may need to mark in your writing: the boundary between the research source you are using and a source they are citing.
Scenario 4: You are quoting or paraphrasing information that the research source you’re using got from somewhere else.
Citation rules usually say that you should seek out the first origin of any idea that you want to use in your essay instead of relying on what the research source you have says about it. But often you will not have access to the original source of the idea, so you have to show in your essay that you know who the original source is even though you didn’t get to read it yourself. This is called an indirect source.
The boundaries of an indirect source have to be marked with a lead-in that mentions the original author and an in-text citation that uses the abbreviation qtd. in to show that the source you are citing is not the origin of the idea.
It will look something like this example from a student essay:
Ecology scholars Siderelis and Salinas have discovered that “parks in warmer climates are more costly to manage” (qtd. in Smith et al. 12778).
In the example above, the authors of the idea that the student wants to use are Siderelis and Salinas, but the student doesn’t have access to that article, so they can’t cite it. Instead, they have to cite the research source they do have, which is by Smith, Wilkins, and Leung. The lead-in is Ecology scholars Siderelis and Salinas have discovered. A lead-in for an indirect source has to mention Siderelis and Salinas because they are the original authors, and it’s a good idea to mention their qualifications so that your reader understands why you are quoting them. The in-text citation is (qtd in Smith et al. 12778), which shows the reader that the student found this idea in the article by Smith, Wilkins, and Leung. There won’t be any citation at the end of the essay for the article by Siderelis and Salinas. Instead the full citation in the Works Cited will be for the source by Smith, Wilkins, and Leung because that’s where the student actually read the idea.
Cite All Your Sources
The most important way to avoid plagiarism is by citing all of the sources of your information with an in-text citation at the boundary and also a full citation at the end of your essay in a Works Cited (MLA) or References (APA) page.
In this section of the workshop, we offered you suggestions for how to make sure you’re putting the citations in the right places: take notes, write a cited outline before you draft your essay, and mark the boundaries where you are using sources in your text.
In the next section we’ll give you more information about how to actually do citations. There are specific rules created by different organizations and appropriate for different classes, so you can’t make up your own ways of citing sources. We’ll start with some explanations about the purpose of citation, then explain rules for when you have to cite a source to make sure you’re not plagiarizing and finally we’ll explain some of the rules for how our citations have to look.
Use Tutoring Assistance for Writing and Citing
You can get writing assistance directly from the tutors for free by writing to:
Coastline College
ATTN: Student Success Center
11460 Warner Avenue
Fountain Valley, CA 92708
The tutors can send you the following help:
- feedback on essay drafts in terms of content, clarity, and if you cited enough evidence
- suggestions for continuing to revise any written assignment on your own
- ideas for how to start an assignment and how to revise it
- strategies for studying effectively for exams/projects
Since tutoring assistance by mail may not fit with your deadline schedule, we also encourage you to use the materials in this packet and your handbooks to provide peer-feedback to help one another to check for in-text citations and check for completeness and accuracy in your full citations.
You may be wondering why peer-feedback is not considered cheating, since we mentioned in the section titled “Types of Cheating” that working on an assignment with other students when your professor did not mean for it to be a group assignment would be considered cheating. We can go back to our weight-lifting example to help explain the difference between peer-feedback and cheating. Asking someone for peer-feedback is like asking someone to watch you lift weights and give you advice about your form so you can do your best and get the most benefit from the weights you’re lifting. You might even have someone spot you while you’re lifting weights so that you can push yourself without so much risk. But the person you’re asking for help would never lift the weights for you. So peer-feedback can help you to get advice about anything you might be missing or that needs fixing in your writing, but the peer doing the feedback will not make any of the changes to your essay for you. You’ll still be doing all of the work yourself.
Review
Here are the 6 suggestions for doing your research and preparing your essay draft that will make it very unlikely that you’ll plagiarize without meaning to do it:
- Take Notes During Your Research
- Paraphrase the Right Way
- Write an Outline
- Mark the Boundaries of the Information You are Using
- Cite All Your Sources
- Use Tutoring or Peer Assistance