Gateways for:
Avoiding Plagiarism
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Q: What type of Material can be used without crediting the source?
Q: What type of Material must Always be Credited?
Summarizing or Paraphrasing without Plagiarizing
Original Text
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Q: What type of Material can be used without crediting the source? |  |
A. Your own independent work. Common knowledge. Common knowledge includes standard information of a field of study as well as folk literature and common sense observations.
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Q: What type of Material must Always be Credited? | |
A. The independent work of any person other than yourself, or any ideas or facts which are not common knowledge. You must acknowledge not only the ideas and facts themselves, but also the language and format in which those ideas and facts appear. That is, the wording, sentence structures, arrangement of thoughts, etc. belong to a writer just as much as the ideas do, and it is for that reason that paraphrases must change the grammatical structure and phrasing while retaining the original intent of the author without distortion.
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Summarizing or Paraphrasing without Plagiarizing | |
Use your own words! Use your own words! Use your own words! State the author's ideas using your own vocabulary, your own phrasing, your own diction, and your own tone of voice; the author's ideas must be made to fit your structure, not the other way around.
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ORIGINAL | |
[from David Suzuki, "Living with Nature"]
In city apartment and dwellings, the presence of cockroaches, fleas, ants, mosquitoes or houseflies is guaranteed to elicit the spraying of insecticides. Mice and rats are poisoned or trapped, while the gardener wages a never-ending struggle with ragweed, dandelions, slugs and root rot. We have a modern arsenal of chemical weapons to fight off these invaders and we use them lavishly.
PLAGIARISM
In our homes, cockroaches, fleas, ants, mosquitoes and flies are guaranteed to be sprayed with insecticides. We poison or trap mice and rats and use a modern arsenal of chemical weapons to fight off ragweed, dandelions, slugs and other invaders.
PLAGIARISM
We employ a modern arsenal of chemical weapons to ward off unwanted insects and animals. We use insecticides against cockroaches, fleas and ants, poisons against rats and mice, and harmful chemicals against ragweed, dandelions, and garden slugs.
SOLUTION #1 [use the author's exact words in quotation marks]
According to Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki (1991), "...the presence of cockroaches, fleas, ants, mosquitoes or houseflies is guaranteed to elicit the spraying of insecticides." We poison mice and rats and use herpicides and insecticides in our gardens to control weeds and slugs. In fact, "we have a modern arsenal of chemical weapons to fight off these invaders and we use them lavishly."
SOLUTION #2 [paraphrase changing both structure and wording]
Our use of enviromentally dangerous pollutants has become so commonplace that we prefer to use aerosol insecticides indoors rather than fly swatters (too messy!) and eradicate weeds from our gardens using chemical poisons rather than pulling them out by hand (too hard!) (Suzuki, 1991).
