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ABC of quotations and your own words and references versus plagiarism
|
One is bad
(and not much different from
plagiarism)
The best way to do this is to
force yourself to write without looking at books or notes.
This will get your own ideas flowing. Shutting yourself away in a room
with just the question, blank sheets of paper and a pen, and the
determination to write the first draft of your essay out of your own mind,
may be frightening - but the more frightening it is the more likely it is
that you need to do this.
When you sit, terrified, in front of a blank piece of paper,
grab the one external support you have: the essay title. By
analysing this will you will make a draft introduction and a structure for
the essay. This will get you started and let you move forward with the
essay draft a step at a time. Even the most gruesome essay is not quite as
frightening when you take its title to bits.
A quotation reproduces in your work the actual words a writer uses. You
should, therefore, take care to copy accurately.
If you copy the actual words a writer uses you should both:
and give a reference.
(Frost, A. 2001 p.9) is the reference.
Remember that a reference needs
a bibliography
Short quotations can be included in the text of your
paragraph.
For example
you might refer to a school leaflet that tells you to "give page numbers in
your references" (School leaflet p.20). This can be written as I have done.
If, however, your quote is longer, you should put the quotation in a
separate paragraph, indented from the margin, and with a clear space
between
it and your main paragraph. Like this:
Remember that a reference needs
a bibliography
Notice that I used quotation marks, even though I indented. The
indentation makes
the quotation stand out. The quotation marks identify it as a quotation.
Some people say
you can omit quotation marks when you indent. This is sometimes done in
books, but, if you do it in college work, you risk being accused of
academic dishonesty.
Some people do not leave a space between their paragraphs, but just rely on
the indentation. This is not very clear on work that is printed to paper.
When work is transmitted electronically, using copy and paste, the
paragraphing can be lost completely. The clear space is important.
Essays from two students with common, or very
similar, passages are also taken to indicate plagiarism.
Read about the
rewards and dangers of working together on essays
In some countries copying is the right thing to do. Teachers want
students to repeat what is in text books. In Britain this is called
"plagiarism" and is the wrong thing to do.
Plagiarism is representing
someone else's work as your own - which is what you do when you copy.
Plagiarism shades into derivative work, which includes following the
argument of a book or article too closely. [Something you will do if you
make to much of your essay a
paraphrase of books, or use a book or lecture
outline rather than
focusing on the title
of an essay]
Another term for cheating is "Academic Dishonesty". Cheating implies
that you intend to do something wrong. But, although this may not be the
case, you may find it taken for granted that if you copied someone else's
work, you intended to cheat. It is important to learn how to
write in your own
words and avoid the crime of plagiarism.
Click
here
for information
about how Plagiarism is dealt with at Middlesex University.
We often find that students who copy
(intentionally or not)
write their essays with
notes or books in front of them, and just alter the words.
If this is what you do: Stop doing it! Next time you draft an
essay, put all books and notes out of sight and write your first draft "out
of your head".
Then, when you have written the ideas that you have in your head, go to
your books and notes for quotations and material to give more substance to
the essay.
Read about good ways
The way that you reference and present your work can avoid
accusations of academic dishonesty.
A good way to present quotations is indented, like this:
Often you will need to précis or paraphrase your own work. You will
want a
summary
of your essay in the
introduction, for example. You may find
that you have written the main part of the essay to concisely, without
explaining everything, you will therefore paraphrase it.
If you paraphrase or précis someone else's work as part of your
text, then you must reference it - but you will not put it into quotation
marks.
Copying someone else's work into your own essay and altering the
words is
not
paraphrasing, it is
plagiarism.
Paraphrasing someone else's work as your essay (even with referencing) is
derivative work. Often you will want a
paraphrase or précis
of someone else's work as part of your essay - but the essay as a whole
should be your own construction. To avoid plagiarism or derivative work,
use the
essay writing strategy and adopt the techniques for
writing in your own words.
Copying
Before
printing, books were written in hand and reproduced by hand. A
reproduction was a copy. Before the
typewriter and carbon paper, copies of
important letters were made by hand and the civil service employed large
numbers of copy clerks.
With computer based
wordprocessing, copying has become simple and with the
world
wide web great libraries of information and ideas can be copied
easily by
anyone with access to the internet.
The most popular way of copying internet material is called
copying and
pasting. (Click for details)
Usually students copy and paste from the internet into a wordprocessor,
usually Microsoft Word. This is in order if what is being copied is to be
used as a quotation. There are problems, however,
1) Microsoft Word copies links from the internet. You need to know how to
stop it doing this (by using a text-editor, for example)
2) If you copy a
reference you should also include the corresponding
bibliography entry.
If you use the internet as a source (copying or not) you should know how to
reference what you use in essays
Jude Carroll's Handbook for Deterring Plagiarism in Higher Education
Support Page at:
Paul Curzon
Joint Information Systems Committee Plagiarism Advisory Service
http://www.jiscpas.ac.uk
Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism
Lisa Hinchliffe has compiled "Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing,
Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism":
The Instructor's Guide to Internet Plagiarism
27.5.2004:
Hello Andrew,
I came across your site:
You offer an overview of some of the points I make on my site and I
thought I should write to offer two corrections.
The site's name is "The Instructor's Guide to Internet Plagiarism". It
was never called the "Internet Cheater Guide".
The site is in fact still online - only at a new address since
1999.
Hope all is well in the UK.
Regards from Ottawa,
Gregg Senechal
Plagiarized.com
My text not yet amended:
This was a web site (running in 1999, but now closed) written by Greggory
Senechal, a Canadian student who thought most students do not want to
cheat.
Students could use his site to find sources of essays/assignments on the
Internet, but it was not specifically designed with the cheating student in
mind. It had a very comprehensive list of sites to get essays from.
Greggory Senechal thought teachers have a feeling of helplessness with
regard to
their students using the Internet to cheat. The nature of cheating has not
changed, but it is easier and quicker than it used to be before the web.
However, the ease and speed with which instructors can catch a cheating
student has kept pace. Tutors often recognise that a students work is
copied from somewhere. His lists of sites was supposed to provide a quick
way of finding out where.
Greggory said he understood the plight of students today:
Andrew Roberts likes to hear from users:
Index
Weblinks on plagiarism and cheating
The good and the bad way to write "in your
own words"
There are two ways to write an essay in your
own words.
Writing an essay by turning the words of a book
into words you would use is the bad way.
The good way is to use your own mind to
construct the issues, instead of following a
book, a lecture or your notes. You should build your essay on ideas
that you develop yourself, rather than following the pattern of ideas that
someone else has provided.
When you have the first draft written this
way, you can go to your notes for the quotations and references that you
need to substantiate your argument and for material that will
help you to develop your essay further.
See
drafting and redrafting
Combining quotes with your
own words can be an effective way to write good essays - But do
not mix your words with the words of books or copy a book and change the
words.
Your introduction is an important means of making your own thought
clear.
See
punctuation for quotation and other marks
Quotations:
put the words in quotation marks
" "
In this example:
Jack Frost wrote "Summer is not coming in"
"Summer is not coming in" is the quotation.
(Frost, A. 2001 p.9).
"When you take notes as you are reading, it is very important to keep a
clear record of the sources as you go along (name of author, title of work,
date of publication, publisher, page reference for quotations)"
(School leaflet p.1)
Plagiarism:
It shades into
derivative work, which
includes
following the
argument
of a book or
article too closely.
"If someone plagiarizes another person's ideas or work, they use it
or copy it, claiming it as their own. You say someone who does this is a
plagiarist or guilty of plagiarism"
(Collins Plain English
Dictionary)
In practice:
Essays
with passages, apart from
quotations, which
are the same as (or almost the same as) passages in
books or journals are taken to indicate plagiarism.
See what the
Marking Guide
says
about Plagiarism.
How to avoid the crime of Plagiarism
Derivative work gets a very poor
mark, but plagiarism is counted as cheating.
to write in your own words
Plagiarism and references
If you use words directly from a book or any other source,
they should be enclosed in quotation marks and the source identified in a
reference. If you rewrite someone else's ideas in your own words, you
should identify this with a reference.
"When you take notes as you are reading, it is very important to keep a
clear record of the sources as you go along (name of author, title of work,
date of publication, publisher, page reference for quotations)"
Notice that I used quotation marks, even though I indented. The
indentation makes
the quotation stand out. The quotation marks identify it as a quotation.
Some people say
you can omit quotation marks when you indent. This is sometimes done in
books, but, if
you do it in college work, you risk being accused of academic dishonesty.
(Sociology leaflet)
Paraphrase and Précis
A
paraphrase
explains a piece of writing in another way. Often it is a
fuller statement, meant to make the original clearer to the reader. A
précis
summarises a passage, that is it gives the main points of the
original in a shorter space.
Other Resources on plagiarism and cheating.
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/4_resource/plagiarism.html
Has a good collection of links - including a collection of cheat sites
"Guilty in Whose Eyes? University students' perceptions of cheating
and plagiarism in academic work and assessment."
Peter Ashworth, Philip Bannister and Pauline Thorne.
Studies in Higher Education, Volume 22, No. 2,
Society for Research into Higher Education, 1997
The authors have interviewed students to determine their views on
cheating and plagiarism. The paper includes a large number of statements
made by students on the subject.
Areas covered include:
The premises started from by students differ from those of
academics. The main findings are:
for CLD Reading Group May 1998
http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm
NOT:
The Internet Cheater Guide
Many are cheated by an inadequate secondary education, leaving them
horrifically unprepared for their post-secondary challenges.
Many are forced to hold down one or more jobs while they study due to
rising tuition and cuts in student aid.
However (he said) cheating only serves to leave you unprepared for
real life.
If you
want to cheat, there really is not much to stop you. As long as you
are prepared to do all the work necessary to hide the evidence - you
probably won't get caught.
However "the amount of work involved in covering up your
cheating usually falls somewhere near the amount of work involved in doing
the work yourself".
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Academic Dishonesty
