Avoiding Plagiarism and using MLA Basic Guidelines for Documentation

What is Plagiarism? Plagiarism is the act of stating or implying that another person's work is your own. You commit plagiarism if you: Submit a paper to be graded or reviewed that you have not written on your own. Copy answers or text from another classmate and submit it as your own. Quote or paraphrase from another paper without crediting the original author. Cite data without crediting the original source. Propose another author's idea as if it were your own. Fabricating references or using incorrect references. Submitting someone else's presentation, program, spreadsheet, or other file with only minor alterations. This is not a definitive list - any action which misleadingly implies someone else's work is your own can constitute plagiarism. We must respect the intellectual property of others.

Common Mistakes Wholesale copying of an entire paper Cut and Paste copying large chunks of text from one or more original sources and inserting them into the assignment Inappropriate Paraphrasing when quoted text is altered only slightly from the original and no acknowledgment of the original author is given Mosaic Plagiarism when phrases and terms are lifted from the source and sprinkled in among the writer’s prose

When do you need to cite your sources? The short answer is that you should cite a source every time you incorporate an idea, quote (written or spoken), data, image or other content that is not yours unless it is common knowledge. Common knowledge refers to any knowledge that you can reasonably expect other people to know.

Basic Guidelines for Documentation MLA

Incorporate quotations INTO sentences Never begin and end a sentence with quotation marks. The quotation must be integrated so that it blends smoothly into the surrounding sentences. Use a signal phrase: Coelho writes, “Meanwhile, the boy thought about his treasure” (89). Or embed the quotation into the sentence grammatically: Santiago “thought about his treasure” (Coelho 89).

In-Text Citations Citations must include the author’s last name and the page number of the original text. Coelho writes, “Meanwhile, the boy thought about his treasure” (89). Santiago “thought about his treasure” (Coelho 89). NOTE: If all citations are from the same source, you only need to cite the author the first time. Santiago “thought about his treasure” (89).

Long Quotations If your quotation is MORE THAN FOUR LINES long when you type it into your paper, it must be set off one inch (tab twice) from the left margin (and double-spaced, like the rest of the paper). Pi describes his situation: Now we were two. In five days the populations of orang-utans, zebras, hyenas, rats, flies and cockroaches had been wiped out. Except for the bacteria and worms that might still be alive in the remains of the animals, there was no other life on the life boat but Richard Parker and me. (139) In this way, the two begin their treacherous journey.

Elipses To skip a section of text, use elipses. Original Text: Except for the bacteria and worms that might still be alive in the remains of the animals, there was no other life on the life boat but Richard Parker and me. Pi explains, “Except for the bacteria and worms…there was no other life on the life boat but Richard Parker and me” (Martel 215).

Elipses You only need elipses at the beginning or end of a quotation if the portion of the sentence you are quoting is an independent clause. Original Text: Except for the bacteria and worms that might still be alive in the remains of the animals, there was no other life on the life boat but Richard Parker and me. Pi explains, “…there was no other life on the life boat but Richard Parker and me” (Martel 215).

To quote dialogue Use the apostrophe to indicate the original quotation marks. Original Text: “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” said the Englishman. The Englishman says to Santiago, “’There’s no such thing as coincidence’” (Coelho 72).

Follow MLA format for the Works Cited page Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000.