Writing Guide!
Writing, Plagiarism & Other Academic Honesty Issues
What IS Academic Honesty? How Do I Know What Is Acceptable or Not?
Most institutions' policies disallow the following:
*plagiarism of any sort (more to come on this topic)
*cheating or accepting help on quizzes and exams
*resubmitting papers/projects already submitted for another course
*using someone else's paper and turning it in as your own
**Check your institution's policy for specifics.
What is plagiarism?
So it's very important to be very careful when writing papers and creating projects.
Plagiarism can be:
1. copying/pasting information directly from the Internet or another source, not citing it and submitting it as your own work.
NOTE: Quotes: You CAN use quotes in papers or projects. BUT you have to put the text in quotation marks and then cite the work in-text and at the end of your paper/project in the "cited sources" list.
2. writing a paper and failing to cite any of your sources of information at the end, effectively submitting the work as your own. That is why you MUST have a page (or a slide if you create a PowerPoint or other project) at the end with your list of sources of information. (In the old days we called it a bibliography.)
3. failing to paraphrase your research. You must read the information in your source. Take notes, and then put the information in your own words. It is NOT enough to just change a few key words. You MUST change the sentence structure, so that your sentence doesn't just have the same structure with synonyms.
4. You even need to cite the images you include in projects! Just a URL below the image on a slide will suffice.
What is a 'similarity report' or 'originality report' for goodness sake?
Usually students can see the similarity report just like the instructor can, so you can see the report is color-coded with the parts of the paper that are matches for something else in the database. You can see where the passage was found--ex. another student's paper, a website, a book, etc.
In addition to a report, students can see their 'percentages,' meaning the percentage of their paper/project that is similar to another paper/project. For example, if your percentage is 33%, then that means that 33% of your work is similar to something the system found that was already submitted.
The generally accepted percentage is 10% to allow for a title page, cited sources page and a quote or two. That's all.
However, the longer your paper/project, the more quotes you can conceivably have because you have more work and a quote or two won't be that much of a percentage of the total work. BUT if you have a 2 or 3 page paper, then you should not have more than one quote.
There ARE situations when a student uses too many quotes and that will skew the percentage. Your instructor has to check on that on a case by case basis. (That's not plagiarism. That's just an overuse of quotes.)
BUT if you use a direct quote and forget the quotation marks, then that is technically plagiarism.
Here are some images of similarity/originality reports from Google Images.
What else do I need to know?
Other Academic Honesty Issues...
Ex. If I took U.S. History in 9th grade and wrote a paper about the American Revolution, and then I take the same course again in the 11th grade & am required to write a paper, can't I submit the same paper again? I mean---I wrote it, so it's not plagiarism, or is it?
In the eyes of Turnitin.com or SafeAssign, etc., it IS plagiarism because I submitted that paper in the 9th grade, and yes, the database remembers my amazing excellent paper from 2 years ago. So my similarity report would be 100%! Wow!
Actually, most institutions specifically state that students can not submit the same paper/project for two different courses.
2. Submitting a friend's paper that I 'sort of' rewrote.
No, do NOT do this. That is plagiarism for sure. Also do NOT buy your paper off the Internet. Again that's plagiarism.
3. But I changed schools? Can't I submit the paper I turned in at School A when I go to School B? Nooooo...chances are that Schools A and B use the same plagiarism checker; but regardless, there will be records and the databases detect similarities.
Citing Your Sources
Your instructor will specify the format and there are a few resources you can use to format your citations.
1. citationmachine.net: You enter the bibliographic information into the website, specify the format (MLA, APA, etc.) and the website will format the citation for you. Then you copy and paste the citation into your paper/project and you are done! (Bibliographic information differs on the type of source (book, website, journal, encyclopedia, personal interview, etc.) Check out the next website for amazing information about researching and writing!
2. Purdue OWL: This site is a one-stop shop for all things research-related.
3. EasyBib: EasyBib is another citation generator like CitationMachine!
4. Microsoft Word: Within Word, students can go to "References" at the top of your screen & click on it. There are a lot of options within that navigation bar. You can even save all of your bibliographic entries for your paper in the document, eliminating the need to save all your research notes as you work. I am including a screen shot of the Word screen and a video I made to help you learn to create a bibliography in your Word document.