Something You Should Avoid

January 2017

Daily School News!

Subject of the Day: Digital Citizenship                                    Digital Citizenship Topic: Plagiarism

What is Plagiarism?  Plagiarism is a serious offense of taking someone’s work or idea and using it as your own. People think of it as just copying. When people use terms like copying, it can make it sound like a minor offense. When you plagiarize, you are presenting work as if it is your own giving no credit or sources to who or where you got the information from. They took their time to develop something and they did not do that for people to take the credit. Plagiarism is considered an act of fraud and to continue turning in someone else’s work as your own or copying words and ideas from someone else without giving credit is wrong.

How Can An Idea Be Stolen? According to the United States law ideas that are original are considered to be intellectual property which is protected by the copyright laws as long as they are written down.

Is Plagiarism A Problem In School? Plagiarism has always been a problem within schools and it has become worse since the internet. It is easy to get access to different work by different people on the internet with just a few words in the search engine. Many students think that they have to hide the fact that they are using sources but it actually makes the paper better because it supports your own thoughts and ideas along with the other sources you used.  

What is Considered Plagiarism and Can You Avoid It?  Plagiarism is considered to be a wide variety of things like not putting in quotation marks around a quotation and giving inaccurate information about the source of the quotation. You can avoid plagiarizing very easily by simply citing your sources. Many teachers encourage their students to make a bibliography for projects, research papers, and essays. A bibliography is a list of all the sources you used during your research process. It generally includes the author's name, the title of the work, name of the company, and location of the company. You can also look up some guidelines for properly citing sources. Planning out your paper is always a good suggestion but remember that plagiarism has to do with using images, videos, and music as well. You have to get proper permission or provide the correct citation. The most common activities are copying media and creating videos using other’s footage or music that is copyrighted. Copying and pasting images from other websites into your own work without giving proper citation is a very popular example of copying media.

How To Plan Out Your Papers? Planning out your paper is always the best thing to do. Taking notes is one of the best ways to prepare to write a paper. By taking notes from all your sources and getting as much information as you can makes it easier to organize. Be careful with taking notes poorly because it can lead to incorrect citation. When taking notes remember to make sure you can tell the difference between your ideas and the ones you have found as well. Don’t forget to write down the information you need for your bibliography or web addresses for every source right away. If you are not sure how to cite properly then you may visit http://westlibrary.mansd.org/student-resources where you will be able to find some resources. It will be more work for you to go back through trying to find the sources all over again. You can then begin with planning out your paper which is an important step to avoid plagiarism. The main focus is balancing your own ideas and the ideas from other sources.

You also must know how to paraphrase which is restating someone’s idea in your own words. You have to change both the sentence structure and the words but without changing the subject. Keep in mind that paraphrasing still includes citation. Paraphrasing will always be handy. Good paraphrasing leaves good point of views in your papers and makes the process a lot easier.