Plagiarism in essayssample from dow

Plagiarism in essays

sample from downloadable HTML program or PDF book

1. Plagiarism in essays occurs when you take someone else’s ideas or words and try to pass them off as your own original work. In its worst form this happens when someone is stuck for ideas and lifts a passage from a textbook, hoping that the use of this ‘borrowed’ material will not be noticed. [It is usually very noticeable.]

2. Sometimes this can happen unintentionally, because the student uses a passage from someone else’s work – but forgets to put quote marks around it. These lifted passages are easily noticeable because of the sudden shift in tone in the writing.

3. You should always acknowledge the original source of any words or ideas which you use in your own work. Any attempt to pass off work which is not your own is regarded as cheating in academic circles, and is usually severely censured.

4. You can either acknowledge any idea you use in summary form:

This is what the critic Stanley Fish has called ‘interpretive communities’ (1) as a strategy in his argument that …

5. Alternatively, you can interrupt your own argument to briefly quote a passage from the original source. As Stanley Fish suggests:

Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. (1)

6. In both cases you must acknowledge that original source, either in a footnote or an endnote, which is shown as follows:

NOTES
1. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class, Harvard University Press, 1980, p.169.

7. Unless you have specifically been asked to discuss or summarise other people’s arguments, you should avoid composing an essay by stringing together accounts of other writers’ work.

8. More difficult instances occur when dealing with ideas that are in the public domain. For instance, you might not know who first thought of a concept you wish to bring into play. In such a case you should simply acknowledge the fact that the idea is not your own.

What follows is the rather stringently worded code on plagiarism from a typical university handbook.