Research Skills for Developing Writers: Identifying Plagiarism

To gain a better understanding of plagiarism in a real writing sample, please complete this plagiarism tutorial from the University of Southern Mississippi.  Some the the information is repeated from the previous tutorial, but some is new.

In particular, pay attention to these sections: 3) "Citing Quotations", 4) "Acceptable Use or Plagiarism Quiz #1", 5) "Paraphrasing and Summarizing", and 6) "Acceptable Use or Plagiarism Quiz #2".  These will give you information about types of citations and give you some practice deciding if a text has been plagiarized.

Click on the image to open the tutorial developed by the University Libraries at the U of Southern Mississippi.  

You may also click on the following link, should the image not take you to the website:  http://lib.usm.edu/plagiarism_tutorial/

Sometimes when you find some information you want to use in your research, the author's wording is so good you do not want to change it--but you still have to cite it!  Even more, sometimes it is hard to know if you have adequately quoted, paraphrased, summarized, and cited a passage from a source.  

You will learn more about paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing in Lesson 8 but for now, here is an excellent webpage from the Purdue Online Writing Lab about how to paraphrase.  You do not have to read the whole page now, but please read the short section titled "6 Steps to Effective Paraphrasing" to learn about a process you can follow that will help you avoid copying too many words and structures from the original source in your own writing.  Below the 6 Steps is also a good example of acceptable and plagiarized adaptations of a source titled "Some Examples to Compare".

When you are revising and reviewing your work to make sure you haven't plagiarized, here is flowchart with a some questions you can ask yourself when you are comparing your work to the original source.

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