Don't forget to quote: avoid plagiarism

By: The Traveler Editorial Board

Posted: 9/12/08

Sometimes, plagiarism is easy to identify.

Stealing an article from a Web site to replace your big political science term paper is clearly plagiarism. Using word-for-word information from a newspaper article in your English assignment is clearly plagiarism. And taking someone's term paper from another class to use in your own? No doubt about it: plagiarism.

But other times, the rules of plagiarism aren't so clear.

What if you just want to re-use a cool sentence you saw in a magazine article? What if you see someone else's blog entry that you really want to post on your own Web site? Or what if you read your friend's paper and just can't get the wording out of your head?

Apparently, many UA students are confused about the rules, too.

Last year, 123 cases of academic dishonesty were reported at the UA, and 50 of those reports involved plagiarism, said Sandra Vasquez, assistant director of the UA Office of Community Standards and Student Ethics.

In the 2005-06 school year, 147 cases of academic dishonesty were reported, with 66 of those being plagiarism, she said.

And even though the numbers might have gone down in the past couple of years, there's still a lot of work to be done in educating the UA community about what it means to plagiarize and the importance of ensuring it doesn't happen.

Opportunities abound to clean up writing and make plagiarism unneeded: head to the "Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism" workshops, take your papers to the Quality Writing Center and have your word-savvy friends read over your assignments before you turn them in.

Graduating from the UA with a tarnished reputation isn't worth not taking the time to double-check sources and cite information clearly.