Plagiarism is simply the act of taking someone else's words or ideas and passing them off as your own. While plagiarism is typically an intentional act, you can also unintentionally plagiarize if you use someone else's ideas and forget to include a citation.
Intentional Plagiarism
Here are a few examples of how plagiarism can occur:
- Copying and pasting content directly from a source without indicating where it is from.
- Not citing information from other sources, whether a paraphrase or direct quote.
- Turning in the same paper or project for more than one class, even if you are the author. That falls under self-plagiarism.
Inadvertent Plagiarism
Inadvertent or accidental plagiarism happens sometimes. Here are a few examples:
- You directly quoted a source and included an in-text citation, but you forgot to put quotation marks around the quote.
- You paraphrased from a source, but you only changed a few words, so it was almost a direct quotation.
Proofreading (or asking someone else to read your writing) is a great way to catch instances of inadvertent plagiarism.
