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Plagiarism
is intellectual theft. It's using
someone else's words,
or their ideas without giving proper
citation.
The most obvious example of that is if
we fail to include
quotation marks, or some sort of citation
that tells us where that material came
from.
There's a few different ways that
students typically plagiarize.
One way is that they completely take a
different article, story, something
someone else wrote, and they just change
the name, and turn it in as their own.
That's definitely plagiarism, and very
intentional.
Another intentional way that students
plagiarize
is that they will take pieces of
other articles, maybe from one article, or
maybe from multiple different articles,
or books and patch them together,
and maybe have a transition sentence or
two in between, but it's mostly someone
else's work. And again,
that's obviously an example of
plagiarism. There's other
less obvious, sometimes unintentional
ways students plagiarize also.
Sometimes a student will try to use a
good resource, a book, an article, and they won't entirely put it in their own words,
but that's because they think that the
author did such a good job
that they're trying to stick as close as
they can to the author.
They might change a word here, or a word there,
but it still plagiarism. Another way
that is
another common form of plagiarism is when students
fail to put a proper citation of some
sort.
They might put a wrong citation and
that's usually an accident, though it
could be intentional
if a student is trying to hide where the material came from.  Sometimes students might get all
their material from one book
and they don't want it to be obvious,
and so they change the footnotes to look
like different books. That's also plagiarism.
 
So one of the things that I'm really stressing with my students today
is anytime they use any type of
outside source whether it be a text book
or weather it be
on the Internet, or whether it be anything
from Wikipedia to anything from Harvard
University,
they have to cite the source.
Unfortunately, they believe if they're using
something word for word, that's the
only time they have to cite the source,
which is
absolutely incorrect. Anytime they use an
image. Any time they use a figure.
Anytime they paraphrase anything 
from a source, they must cite the source. 
 
I would define plagiarism as the the use, or rather miss use, of someone else's ideas. 
When you have a thought, a statistic, a date, 
any bit of information that is not your
information, and you put it in your paper,
and you don't let someone else know that
it is not your information, you've
technically just plagiarized.
All the ideas in the library--every book,
every article
they're pretty much not your ideas, so
anytime you act like they are your ideas
that's tantamount to theft.
It's an intellectual theft, but it's a
theft nonetheless. It would be like
stealing someone's car,
stealing someone's puppy. You don't want to steal someone's puppy,
so you don't want to steal their ideas--right? So anytime
you have outside information that's what
you want to do. You always make sure 
you introduce your sources, cite your sources,
and that's gonna clear up plagiarism
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