Plagiarism Guide
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What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is when another author's knowledge is used without giving credit to that author. Most common acts of plagiarism involve uncredited text, however plagiarism can also be committed with images, presentation slides, music, computer code, and equations.
There is four general types of plagiarism:
Stealing
Material that is directly lifted from a source without citation or any indication that it is from another author.
Misquoting
When an author is quoted incorrectly. Often students will misquote another author to strengthen their own argument or because they don't fully understand the topic.
Insufficient Paraphrasing
Taking an author's words and changing them slightly, without quoting the actual text is plagiarism. Students need to write it entirely in their own words or put the author's text in quotes and reference the source. Instructors can easily tell when this happens because everyone has their own style of writing and seeing styles change throughout a document is a red flag that plagiarism has occurred.
Duplicating publication
Self-plagiarism is possible if the student reuses/recycles their own paper/words for use in another assignment without explicit permission from the instructor or without credit for the previous work.