Plagiarism! (Didn't I hear about that somewhere?)

Plagiarism is not something a person may immediately think of when thinking of polytheism, but when it comes to research--it's all too common. And most of the time, it can be completely by accident.

What is plagiarism?

First and foremost, what is plagiarism? To put it in my own words, plagiarism is presenting someone else's words as your own. 

If I were to write the following:


...I just plagiarized. That is a sentence and definition from Plagiarism.Org's Glossary. But I didn't credit the website with the definition. Instead, I implied it was my own creation. 

In other words, don't copy and paste. 

How do I avoid plagiarism then?

To avoid plagiarizing, I should have written:


This forum is informal, so that is what I would consider the "bare minimum" for posts. In the academic world, using a "Works Cited" or "Bibliography" are important and have standardized forms. Luckily, there are websites like EasyBib that make citing sources very easy. On this forum, I recommend some form of "works cited" for whenever long information posts are made.

Take for instance my thread, "Mythology, Folklore, etc... What do they mean?" At the bottom of the thread, I have listed my Works Cited in alphabetical order. I got the format thanks to EasyBib (which makes things super easy.) 

Why is this important?

For starters, avoiding plagiarism is important because it is disrespectful to the authors plagiarists steal from. People put a lot of thought and work into what then gets stolen in less than five minutes. Not cool. 

It is also dishonest. Implying that I created the definition of plagiarism I used in my example is a form of lying.

And finally, citing works allows someone to see where you got your sources. Using my example, without citing where I got the definition, people can't go to the source and learn more about plagiarism. By citing my source, I am allowing people to expand their knowledge if they wanted to.

Oh! And it's a crime.

What is the difference between plagiarism and paraphrasing?

Well, first the similarity is that a person still need to cite their sources! Where did someone stumbles upon their knowledge? Even if they are paraphrasing or able to draw conclusions based off information they gathered, they still need to cite what evidence they were looking at. 

For this article, a lot of my sources is 10+ years of rigorous academic classes, where I was taught by numerous teachers to memorize the MLA format and how to avoid plagiarism. But I also did some brushing up. I looked to Wikipedia and Plagiarism.Org, for instance. At the bottom of this thread, they will be cited. 

Back to the question. Plagiarism is directly stealing, whereas paraphrasing tends to be using different words to express the same idea. Plagiarism.Org defines paraphrasing as "a restatement of a text or passage in other words.
" The website also adds this caveat: "It is extremely important to note that changing a few words from an original source does NOT qualify as paraphrasing. A paraphrase must make significant changes in the style and voice of the original while retaining the essential ideas. If you change the ideas, then you are not paraphrasing -- you are misrepresenting the ideas of the original, which could lead to serious trouble."

Look back to my example. I "changed" the definition slightly to fit my sentence, didn't I? But I didn't change enough and only changed a few words--so I was still plagiarizing.

But the best way to avoid plagiarism...

...is to use multiple sources.

The graphic at the beginning of this thread is a sorta joke I heard a lot while in school, but there is a reason why using multiple sources lessens the chances of plagiarism. When a person only reads one source on a subject, anything they produce is going to just be that subject rehashed in different words. Which can be useful if it's perhaps a retelling of Beowolf to be understandable to a modern audience.

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