Definition
According to the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary , plagiarism is the act of presenting the words, ideas, images, sounds, or the creative expression of others as your own.

Plagiarism can also be defined as cheating or deception .

Our school has included plagiarism in the school discipline code.
Cheating and plagiarism is a Level 2 offense.

How serious is the problem?
A national survey published in
Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in
"serious" cheating.
http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism_stats.html

Copyright
Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works.
This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wci

Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is that which can be protected under federal law, including copyrightable works, ideas, discoveries, and inventions. Such property would include novels, sound recordings, a new type of mousetrap, or a cure for a disease.
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/i051.htm

Intellectual Property
??? Confused???
Your intellect is your brain power
– what you are able to understand, interpret and demonstrate that you know!
If something – a picture, an idea, a story, etc. – comes entirely from YOU, the it is
YOUR intellectual property.

Why is this important?
This is something you want to THINK about when you begin to write.
A “new” story about a character from
Star
Wars would be illegal because almost everything about Star Wars belongs to
George Lucas – it’s HIS intellectual property!

If you have included the words and ideas of others in your work that you neglected to cite or
If you have had help you wouldn’t want your teacher to know about,
You have probably plagiarized!!!!!

Intentional Plagiarism
•Copying a friend’s work
•Buying or borrowing papers
•Cutting and pasting blocks of text from electronic sources without documenting
•Media “borrowing” without documentation
•Web publishing without permission of creators

Unintentional Plagiarism
•Careless paraphrasing
•Poor documentation
•Quoting excessively
•Failure to use your own “voice”

Excuses
I was too busy to write that paper!
(Big game, too much homework, doing chores!)
My teachers expect too much!
That assignment was so boring!
My parents expect me to get A’s!
It’s okay if I don’t get caught!
Everyone does it!

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
•Use your own words and ideas.
•Give credit for copied, adapted, or paraphrased material.
•Avoid using others’ work with minor changes
•Beware of common knowledge

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Use Your Own Words and Ideas
•This is a skill that improves with practice.
•It requires an understanding of the topic.
•It requires that you give yourself credit for your own abilities.

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Give Credit for Copied, Adapted, or
Paraphrased Material
Use these three strategies :
•Quoting
•Paraphrasing
•Summarizing

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Quoting
Quotations are the exact words of an author, copied directly from a source, word for word.
Quotations must be cited.

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Use quotations when:
•You want to add the power of an author’s words to support your argument
•You want to disagree with an author’s argument
•You want to highlight particularly eloquent or powerful phrases or passages
•You are comparing and contrasting specific points of view

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Do you have to cite everything?
Facts that are widely known, or information considered to be common knowledge (i.e. George
Washington was the first president of the United States) do not have to be cited.

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing means to rephrase the works of an author by putting his/her thoughts in your own words. You rework the source’s ideas, words, phrases and sentence structures with your own.

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Paraphrasing
Paraphrase when:
•You plan to use information on your note cards and wish to avoid plagiarizing
•You want to avoid overusing quotations
•You want to use your own voice to present information

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Paraphrasing
Avoid using others’ work with minor
“ cosmetic
” changes.
Examples
: using “less” for “fewer”, reversing the order of the sentence, changing a compound sentence to two simple sentences, altering a spread sheet layout.

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Summarizing
Summarizing involves putting the main idea(s) into your own words, including only the main point(s). Summaries are significantly shorter than the original and take a broad overview of the source material. Once again, it is necessary to attribute summarized ideas to the original source.

Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism
Summarize when:
•You want to establish background or offer an overview of a topic
•You want to describe knowledge (from several sources) about a topic
•You want to determine the main ideas of a single source

Guidelines for Notetaking
•Include any direct quotes or unique phrases in quotation marks or mark with a big Q and make sure the speaker’s/writer’s name is identified.
•Make sure you note a paraphrase with the writer’s name and mark it with a big P .
•Include page numbers and source references so you can go back and check for accuracy as you write.

Citing Sources
Your teachers will give you additional information on how to cite sources.
Remember that when doing internet searches you should not cite GOOGLE ,
ASK.COM
, YAHOO or any other search engine as a source of information. The specific site from where you obtained the information is the source you cite.

Citing Sources
For Example:
These are SEARCH ENGINES
Google
Ask http://www.google.com/ http://www.ask.com/
These are SPECIFIC SOURCES http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington

Famous Plagiarizers
•Stephen Ambrose, historian
•Al Gore, politician
•Alex Haley, author
•Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader
•George Harrison, Beatle
•Dan Brown, author (accused)
•Saddam Hussein, dictator

Works Cited
• Merriam Webster On-line Dictionary http://www.mw.com/dictionary/plagiarizing
• Plagiarism.org
http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism_stats.html
• United States Copyright Office http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wci
• ‘Lectric Law’s Library http://www.lectlaw.com/def/i051.htm
• What is Plagiarism?
http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/plagiarism.ppt
• Purdue University Online Writing Lab http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_quotprsum.html
• Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Famous_accusations_and_e xamples_of_plagiarism