WHY ARE MY INSTRUCTORS SO CONCERNED

WHY ARE MY INSTRUCTORS SO CONCERNED ABOUT PLAGIARISM?

In order to understand plagiarism, it helps to understand the process of sharing and creating ideas in the university. All knowledge is built from previous knowledge. As we read, study, perform experiments, and gather perspectives, we are drawing on other people’s ideas. Building on their ideas and experiences, we create our own. When you put your ideas on paper, your instructors want to distinguish between the building block ideas borrowed from other people and your own newly reasoned perspectives or conclusions. You make these distinctions in a written paper by citing the sources for your building block ideas. Providing appropriate citations will also help readers who are interested in your topic find additional, related material to read—in this way, they will be able to build on the work you have done to find sources.

Think of it this way: in the vast majority of assignments you’ll get in college, your instructors will ask you to read something (think of this material as the building blocks) and then write a paper in which you analyze one or more aspects of what you have read (think of this as the new structure you build). Essentially, your instructors are asking you to do three things:

Show that you have a clear understanding of the material you’ve read.
Refer to your sources to support the ideas you have developed.
Distinguish your analysis of what you’ve read from the authors’ analyses.
When you cite a source, you are using an expert’s ideas as proof or evidence of a new idea that you are trying to communicate to the reader.