How to Avoid Plagiarism Lecture

This lesson is on How to Avoid Plagiarism. Here’s the definition of plagiarism. It is using someone else’s words or ideas as your own. It doesn’t matter if you intend to use the words or if you accidentally use the words. If you use someone else’s work it’s still plagiarism. Here’s an example of a student committing plagiarism. You see that the words that are black are exactly the same as those black words in the original. And the pink words are the student’s different words that they used but they’re almost the same and the grammar is exactly the same as the original source. And remember, the reason why this is plagiarism is because the student is pretending these are his own words. He did not cite his source. Even though he obviously took from this source on the left. So now we’re going to talk about some ways to prevent plagiarism. First of all you have to put quotation marks around any word that you borrow from another source. Then you have to use in-text citations. That means you give credit to your source. You say where you got those words that you borrowed. So let’s look at an example. This is the first way that you can prevent plagiarism when you’re borrowing words from another source. You can use a direct quote with attribution. Take a moment to read this. Pause the video if you need more time. Over here on the left you can see the source information Gregory Twatchman is the author of those words on the left, so when the student uses this information in his essay, he chooses here to use attribution. Attribution just means using the author’s name in the sentence. Or saying where the source comes from. And notice that after the attribution, we have the quote. And notice that the quoted words are exactly the same and we put quotation marks around them. Now it’s very clear that these are not the student’s words, they come from another source. And it’s clear to see what that source is because of the attribution. Now the student is not plagiarizing. The second way to prevent plagiarizing when using someone else’s words is to use a direct quote but without attribution and that’s what this student does. The student does not mention the authors’ name in the sentence. See if you can tell what they did. Take a minute to read and you can pause the video if you need to. The student still put quotation marks around all of the part that is borrowed from the original source. But instead of using attribution, that means instead of introducing the author in the sentence, the student put the in-text citation at the end of the sentence. And notice here it’s in parentheses and it goes before the period. This is also a correct way to give credit to the other source. So here the student is not plagarizing either. This is the third solution to plagiarizing. So this is the third choice that you have as a way to avoid plagiarism. Take a minute to read this, and see what the student did. You can pause the video if you need to. Here the student used attribution again, so he mentions the writer’s name in his sentence, but this time there’s no quotation marks. That’s because the student used paraphrase. Paraphrase means to change the words and grammar, but not change the meaning. So the student used his own words and grammar to repeat the idea of the source, but when the student does that he still has to give credit to the original source. The student could not pretend that this was his idea because he got it from another source. So he uses attribution to give credit to that source. Again, this student is not plagiarizing. This is a correct use of another source. And here’s the fourth option. Pause the video while you read this. As we said, this is without attribution, so the student gives credit to the original source at the end of the sentence. This is a paraphrase so there are no quotation marks, and notice that the grammar and vocabulary are mostly different. That makes this a paraphrase. And the student used the in-text citation at the end of the sentence instead of using attribution. This is the correct way to give credit to the original source. Now let me say one more thing about paraphrasing. You’ve probably noticed that there are some words here that are exactly the same as the original source. The rule is that in your paraphrase, it’s okay to have a word or two that are the same as the original source. You just cannot have more than three words that are the same. If you have more than three words that are the same, then you need to use quotation marks. Just like everything else with writing, it takes practice to know how to use an in-text citation. But it’s very important that you do this so that you don’t get into trouble with plagiarism.