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Sample Lecture Notes: Plagiarism |
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Students generally know that copying or using someone else's paper is plagiarism, but they may need instruction on the finer points of citation and documentation to avoid unintentionally stealing words or ideas from another.
Begin with a few cases for discussion. The more you can tie them into your discipline or personal experience, the better, but here are some samples:
Maria and Tina need to produce a proposal for their Parks and Recreation paper (which they are co-writing), fast. They have put off writing till a week before the due date. Maria's father is a landscape engineer, and he has produced a plan for his hometown for a park with walking paths. Maria "borrows" it, and the girls simply change the title page and turn it in.
Brian is using a very good source for his paper on computer-mediated education; in fact, it is so good he feels he is perhaps using too many direct quotes. He decides to delete a few quotation marks and take out the internal citation so that he can disguise how much he is using this source. Of course, he does properly document most of the direct quotes.
Explain the logic of documentation:
gives credibility to writer (knows available literature) helps reader follow argument or check claims helps reader find out more
Explain the concept of direct quotation. Provide an excerpt from a source and show a correctly documented direct quote.
Explain the concept of paraphrase. Provide an excerpt from the same source and show a correctly documented paraphrase.
Explain the relationship between internal quotes (or footnotes) and the bibliography (or references). Show more examples. You can use a sample from a journal in your field or from a student paper.
Tell students they can get help with citation and documentation at the University Writing Center or from the Evans Library web site. From the Evans site, they view take a tutorial and take a quiz. The results can be sent to you.
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