What Is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the unauthorized or uncredited use of the writings or ideas of another in your writing. While it might not be as tangible as auto theft or burglary, plagiarism is still a form of theft.

In the academic world, plagiarism is a serious matter because ideas in the forms of research, creative work, and original thought are highly valued. Because students elect to attend college, instructors and professors assume they are willing to engage in the often difficult and frustrating work of college-level learning. Because college degrees are legal documents, your professors will often take strong stands against plagiarism to keep their courses legitimate.

Prince George’s Community College has strict rules about what happens when someone is caught plagiarizing. The penalty for plagiarism is severe, everything from a failing grade for the plagiarized work, a failing grade for the class, or expulsion from the institution.  

Types of Plagiarism

You might not be aware that plagiarism can take several different forms. While some plagiarism is intentional theft, other plagiarism might be unintentional, like the novice student whose paraphrase is too close to the original source. Whatever the intention of the situation, it’s important to note that students can still be held accountable.

Understanding the various types of plagiarism can help you avoid it.

Intentional Plagiarism

The most well known, purposeful or intentional plagiarism. Intentional plagiarism occurs when a writer knowingly and intentionally uses the words, information, or ideas of others without giving proper credit to the source text. Intentional plagiarism is a purposeful attempt to cheat the system by submitting work or writing that the student did not, in fact, complete on their own.

Intentional plagiarism might take the following forms:

• handing in an essay written by someone else
• paying a ghostwriter or essay mill to create an essay for a course
• copying words or phrases from a source without proper citation
• using a paper mill or study “help” website instead of doing original work
• downloading an essay from the internet
• using an app to try and mask an attempt to copy a source or work

Intentional plagiarism is a serious offense because it amounts to a student attempting to get credit for work that is not their own. Credit could result in an unearned course credit or an unearned degree.

Accidental Plagiarism

A much more common and less understood phenomenon is “accidental” plagiarism.  Unlike intentional plagiarism, in situations of accidental plagiarism, a student does not necessarily intend to cheat. They may be unaware that taking a certain shortcut is considered cheating or academic dishonesty, but by the time student writers reach college-level courses, it is assumed that they understand that they are supposed to do their own work. Ignorance is rarely a good defence.

Accidental plagiarism is more often the result of improperly paraphrasing, summarizing, quoting, or citing your evidence in your academic writing.  Generally, writers accidentally plagiarize because they simply don’t know or they fail to follow the rules for giving credit to the ideas of others in their writing.

Accidental plagiarism might take on the following forms:

• writing a paraphrase that uses wording, organization, or phrasing from the original source
• failing to introduce a summary as information that came from a source
• failing to cite a quotation as a quote
• failing to list the bibliographic information for a summarized, paraphrased or quoted source
• failing to include a parenthetical citation for a summarized, paraphrased, or quoted source
• including incorrect citation information in either the text and/or the bibliography

EGL 1010 is designed to help students practice and hone their writing skills so they can avoid plagiarism. However, as the semester progresses, it is expected that students will put the information we cover into practice. Now that you have learned about the possible ways of accidentally plagiarizing, your instructor will expect that you check over your writing for these errors before submission.

Both purposeful and accidental plagiarism are wrong, against the rules, and can result in harsh punishments. It is very difficult to prove that you didn’t intend to copy from a source, when the evidence is in your essay.

Other Forms of Academic Dishonesty

In addition to plagiarism, there are other forms of academic dishonesty related to writing and source use. Be sure that you review the PGCC Student Handbook and that you understand the rules listed there. Students enrolled in courses at the college are assumed to be aware of the Student Code.

Other forms of academic dishonesty include misrepresenting sources, cheating, and falsifying information. Posting test answers or essays to online cheat sites and paper mills could also involve a student in charges of academic dishonesty. Stealing other student’s work and posting them to such sites could bring additional charges.

Using Sources Ethically

Plagiarism and academic dishonesty is not always a black or white issue. Because there are a range of irresponsible ways to use sources, it’s important that students focus on using sources ethically.

What does it mean to use sources ethically? It means that when you sit down to write, you are consciously doing your best to represent the sources you use responsibly, clearly, and correctly.

Students are often concerned with the details of correct citation—when to include an author’s name in parentheses, how to format an MLA bibliography, how to indicate a quotation within a quotation—and while these are all important and helpful to know, what is more important is understanding the larger ethical principles that guide choosing and using sources.

Here are a few of these larger ideas to keep in mind as you select and synthesize your sources:

• You must represent the topic or discipline you are writing about fairly. If nine out of ten sources agree that evidence shows the middle class in the United States is shrinking, it is unethical use the tenth source that argues it is growing without acknowledging the minority status of the source.
• You must represent the individual source fairly. If a source acknowledges that a small segment of the middle class in the United States is growing but most of the middle class is shrinking, it is unethical to suggest that the former is the writer’s main point.
• You must acknowledge bias in your sources. It is unethical to represent sources that, while they may be credible, offer extreme political views as if these views are mainstream.
• You must acknowledge all sources, even informal ones. Just because your source is an informal one, or from Wikipedia or the dictionary doesn’t mean that you don’t have to acknowledge it. Quoting a dictionary definition is still quoting: you need quotation marks. Wikipedia is not “common knowledge”: cite it. Don’t think you’ll be able to hide the use of such sources from your professors–these are often the easiest types of plagiarism to find with a simple Google search.
• You must summarize and paraphrase in your own words. Changing a few words around in the original and calling it your summary or paraphrase is unethical. How would you feel if you recognized what you worked so hard to write in someone else’s paper? “I changed some words,” they’d say. But you would still recognize your style. Don’t steal someone else’s.

If you approach source use ethically, you will be much less likely to run into issues of accidental plagiarism.

Maybe even more importantly, by approaching source citation ethically, writers can create more effective essays and texts. Citing ethically means that a writer is providing the “receipts” for where their information is coming from. They are showing their reader exactly how much hard work they’ve done to achieve knowledge about the topic, and they can claim their own authority through the citations.

Think of it this way, as a FYC student, you likely are not an expert at anything–not in any certifiable way. Your professors don’t expect you to walk into their classroom already knowing the information they’re about to teach. You prove that you’ve done the work of learning through your citations.

Plagiarism and the Internet

Sometimes, the ease of finding and retrieving information on the World Wide Web makes student writers believe that this information does not need to be cited.  After all, it isn’t a traditional source like a book or a journal. It is available for “free.”  All a research writer needs to do with a web site is “cut and paste” whatever he needs into his essay, right?  

Wrong!  

Writers need to cite the evidence from the Internet in the same way they cite evidence from other sources.  To not do this is plagiarism, or, more bluntly, cheating. Just because the information is “freely” available on the Internet does not mean a writer can use this information in their academic writing without properly citing it. This is no different than the way that  library journals and books are “freely” available but still need to be cited.

Other Media

It is also not acceptable to simply download graphics, videos, or music from the World Wide Web. Other media, including images and photographs, found on the Internet are protected by copyright laws. Quite literally, taking images from the Web (particularly from commercial sources) is an offense that could lead to legal action.  There are places where you can find graphics and clip art that Web publishers have made publicly available for anyone to use, but be sure that the Web site where you find the graphics makes this explicit before you take graphics as your own.

In short, you can use evidence from the Web as long as you don’t plagiarize and as long as you properly cite it; don’t take graphics from the Web unless you know the images are in the public domain.