Most people would not take our neighbor’s car without asking. Many people would return a mislaid wallet. Countless are aghast at the thought of stealing from the elderly. I would say overall everyone agrees taking what is not ours is wrong. But, I daresay, is taking credit for someone else’s words or intellectual property really the same as taking someone’s tangible property. Affirmative, my friends. It is.
Whether you call it academic dishonesty, cheating or plagiarism it is theft and there is a consequence. It doesn’t matter where you plunder for words: the internet, an actual book, or an older siblings 3 year-old research paper. If it is not your words, don’t use it unless you give credit by documenting your sources. However, I doubt there is a teacher on campus who would be happy about a recycled research paper.
Most schools and places of employment have rules and penalties in place to help you know what constitutes plagiarism, how to properly credit the sources you use and what happens if you don’t. In Ivy Tech’s Code of Students’ Rights and Responsibilities handbook there is information on the school’s policies regarding this issue. Our campus provides many resources to help you understand and avoid plagiarism. From Blackboard you can reach the Bloomington library’s main page with the big help button; once you press ‘citing sources’ you will be on your way to being a cite-sourcing guru.
Plagiarism is a type of theft that comes in varied degrees and forms. Plagiarism.org has 10 different types of knowledge-pilfering methods listed. Did you know that you can plagiarize yourself? The regurgitation of a previous assignment is big cheat. It may be your work, but you are expected to produce new material for each class. You may cite yourself, but you cannot replace yourself and the work that is expected.
Forgetting citations on anyone’s work is wrong. Whether it is someone you don’t know or your Great Aunt Sue, we need to know where the information originated. And know fully from where the information was gleaned. Partial citation is not sufficient; the work must genuinely be yours.
Poor paraphrasing, as well as giving citations but ending up with a finished product that lacks originality is a big no-no. Paraphrasing doesn’t mean becoming a second-rate wordsmith with your trusty thesaurus - a word change artist per se. The information you have gathered is grist for the mill to be put with your own knowledge to make something authentic and new.
And then there is common knowledge. It is a tricky one. According to Indiana University’s Writing Tutorial Services page on plagiarism, common knowledge is stuff everyone knows and the information should be found in great quantity. The decision on what is common knowledge and what is not common knowledge makes this problematic. Thanks to the movie Finding Nemo we all know to stay clear of jellyfish, but how many people know that starfish (now called sea stars) do not have brains or blood. Or did you know that clownfish can change their sex? I sure didn’t. Most sources will tell you that if you do not know whether it is common knowledge it is best to cite the source and err on the side of caution.
What does it mean to cite a source? You are telling the reader that you have had help with your work. You are giving credit where it is due. There are several ways to cite sources and what is required depends on what your instructor wants. Our Bloomington Campus Library help page lists 4 different styles for source citing with MLA and APA being the most common. When writing an article for journalism, I need to use the AP style of attribution which lets the readers know right away where I got my information. Other style guides will have you do in-text citations or make a separate page listing all the sources that you used.
Words mean a lot. They carry a lot of weight and they are not easy to produce. It took me hours to write this article. Many great people have said many great things and we must acknowledge and respect that. Who knows, you may be one of those people? I like Ben Franklin’s sage advice, “Honesty is the best policy.” That sounds like a great idea to me.