What Is Plagiarism?

Answer:

Plagiarism is a serious form of academic misconduct. It involves both appropriating someone else’s work and passing it off as one’s own work afterwards. Thus, you commit plagiarism when you present someone else's written or creative work (words, images, ideas, opinions, discoveries, artwork, music, recordings, computer-generated work, etc) as your own.

Types of plagiarism:

• Cut and Paste — Putting together extracts from different authors to make up your own essay.
• Copying — Copying word for word from books, articles, interviews, e-mails, or another students’ essay.
• Paraphrasing without referencing — Rewriting another author’s ideas and presenting them as your own.

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use:

• Another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
• Any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings — any pieces of information — that are not common knowledge;
• Quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
• Paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.