Plagiarism: Avoiding Plagiarism

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use

• Another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
• Any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge;
• Quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
• Paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.

There are three ways of incorporating other writers’ work into your own writing.

Quotation: using someone's words. When you quote, place the passage you are using in quotation marks, and document the source according to a standard documentation style.

Paraphrase: using someone's ideas, but putting them in your own words. Although you use your own words to paraphrase, you must still acknowledge the source of the information.

Summary: should be shorter than the original passage.  The summary should keep the author's original message in mind.  Make sure your summary does not change the intent of the piece.