Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty, which, according to the Monroe Community College Catalog and Student Handbook, can result in “a grade of ‘F’ for the course.” And “further disciplinary action in any case of repeated infractions, or in cases of complicity on a large scale… may result in probation, suspension or expulsion.” The following is the MCC Student Handbook description of plagiarism:

“Plagiarism is using someone else’s work as if it were one’s own, whether or not it is done intentionally. This includes, but is not limited to: using the exact language, using nearly the exact language, and using ideas without showing they originated in another’s work. The work taken from another person or source (including publications, web sites, speeches, etc.) may be as little as an isolated formula, portions of a speech, a simple sentence, an idea, or as much as entire paragraphs, papers, or writings of professionals or other students; however, well-known, common knowledge is generally an exception. Omitting quotation marks when using language copied from another’s work, failing to use citations for ideas or language taken from other authors, or failing to use one’s own style of writing when summarizing and paraphrasing someone else’s work constitute plagiarism. Any form of plagiarism is essentially an act of cheating.”

Additionally, the Psychology Department has its own plagiarism policy

In other words, anytime somebody else’s work is taken for use in one’s own project, and this includes an AI response, a citation or reference must be made to the original creator of the work, whether it is a copied string of words (usually three or more is considered the minimum, in which case quotation marks must be used), a paraphrased idea, information, or other types of human intellectual products.

There is nothing wrong with using another person’s work in one’s own project, as long as the original creator of the work is cited. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with using a lot of other people’s work in your paper – as long as it is all properly cited. (The trick is to organize it well into your piece, and not to quote verbatim much, which is a weakness of style.) If you don’t cite the source, you are, in effect, pretending the words or thought or facts are your own, the products of your hard work, and this is cheating. One thing to be especially careful about: if you copy someone else’s words, and give a citation but don’t put the copied words inside quotation marks, you are still plagiarizing.

Sources for some of the common methods used for citing material include:

The Chicago Manual of Style. Their brief citation guide is online. The reference desk in the library has the real thing.
Diana Hacker’s A Pocket Style Manual. (Available from the MCC Bookstore. If you don’t already own one of these books, at least buy this one. A style manual is as necessary for your work as is a dictionary. Get one and keep it handy.)
Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL)
Hodge’s Harbrace College Handbook. The University of California Berkeley library

In the Hodge’s Harbrace College Handbook, plagiarism is described as follows:

“Any failure to acknowledge borrowed material is a serious offense called plagiarism. If a borrowed idea is expressed in the student’s phraseology, an acknowledgment of the source is sufficient. If it is in the phraseology of the source, it should be put in quotation marks and also acknowledged. Usually any conscious quotation (except well-known or proverbial passages) of three or four connected words or more should be placed in quotation marks.”

The Handbook also gives advice on the use of quotations:

“Too many quotations in the library paper suggest a lack of mastery of the subject. And besides, the more a student quotes, the less practice he gets in composition. A quotation must be a very telling and important one before a student is justified in using it in his paper. Occasionally, however, a student will discover such a passage. When he does, he should take down the passage verbatim – that is, write every word, every capital letter, every mark of punctuation exactly as in the original [see note, below]. Then he should enclose the quoted passage in quotation marks. When a [person] quotes, he should quote accurately. When he is not quoting, he should use his own phraseology, getting entirely away from the original.”

(Note: It is occasionally considered acceptable to alter a word, and to change punctuation to fit the grammatical structure of one’s own sentence if the passage quoted is not a complete sentence, or otherwise incapable of standing on its own. However, to be safe, any alterations to the original should be shown within brackets, which is always acceptable.)

My advice – to avoid inadvertent copying of phraseology – is to not have the source you are using open while writing. Take sketchy notes from it, then close the original source and write from your sketchy notes. (If your notes themselves are too close in wording to the original, or contain exact wording of the original, then this method will not save you, and that is why I say, “sketchy notes.”)

The Purdue OWL also has a set of pages to explain and to help avoid plagiarism.

I sometimes go to great lengths to track down what appear to me as instances of cheating or plagiarism. I play this cat-and-mouse game well: I am quite often successful. Plagiarism is simply a bad thing to do. Remember, if you use quotation marks when copying wording, and show your source, or if you just show a source when presenting someone else’s idea or data in your own words (really your own, and not a remix of the original), then you are safe. The trouble comes when you use someone else’s work (yes, they did the work) without giving them the credit. Aside from outright cheating, the most common infractions come when a student doesn’t even realize he’s plagiarizing: thought it would be okay, thought he changed the words around enough, thought the citation alone (but no quotation marks) protects against accusations of plagiarizing, etc.

An additional complication has been created by artificial intelligence (AI) machines, to which we all have easy access. These are valuable resources for a variety of tasks, but having them write or rewrite your work is plagiarism. Here is a paragraph written by ChatGPT explaining this:

“Using AI to write or rewrite one’s own work can be considered plagiarism because it involves outsourcing the creation of content to a machine rather than producing the work independently. While AI can assist with drafting or refining ideas, relying on it to generate significant portions of a piece undermines the concept of original authorship. The key element of plagiarism is the misrepresentation of someone else’s work as one’s own, and in this case, the work generated by AI is not truly the individual’s own effort. This practice can deceive others into believing the individual contributed all of the intellectual labor when, in reality, a machine was responsible for much of the content creation.”

And no, I probably could not have said it any better myself, but notice that I explicitly showed that it was written by ChatGPT and not by me. (Many students think that Grammarly is acceptable, but it is not, it is an AI machine that rewrites your work.)

As a teacher, I can not safely determine when a student’s acts of plagiarism were unintentional and when they were intentional. Unintentional shoplifting is still a crime, as is unintentional plagiarism, but I do have a bit of compassion. However, I have to be fair to all, and this sort of fairness often calls compassion into question.

(Students who are really interested in cheating, despite the warnings, should know that teachers like myself are aware of college paper dumping sites like “schoolsucks.com,” and that we have sites of our own and special software that help detect both traditional and AI plagiarism. And for those of you who are religious, a higher authority is always watching. Don’t cheat.)

Some examples:

Let’s say you want to write a paper about plagiarism and found this web page (yes, this one) useful, and you want to include some of the material from it in your paper.

One paragraph of your paper begins…

It is occasionally considered acceptable to alter a word, and to change punctuation to fit the grammatical structure of one’s own sentence if the passage quoted is not a complete sentence, or otherwise incapable of standing on its own. However, to be safe, any alterations to the original should be shown within brackets, which is always acceptable.

If you left it in your paper like that, you are guilty of the very worst form of plagiarism. You took what I wrote word-for-word and pasted it into your paper without any citation. You pretended it was all yours.

What if you began…

According to Ofsowitz, it is occasionally considered acceptable to alter a word, and to change punctuation to fit the grammatical structure of one’s own sentence if the passage quoted is not a complete sentence, or otherwise incapable of standing on its own. However, to be safe, any alterations to the original should be shown within brackets, which is always acceptable (Ofsowitz, 2011).

Well, sorry, but this is still plagiarism and you are guilty, guilty, guilty. The problem here is that although you properly showed a citation for where the information came from, you are claiming that the writing (the wording) is your own. You would be guilty of stealing my knack for writing, despite the citation. The citation only tells the reader where the information came from; it does not tell the reader that you copied the wording.

One way to avoid that form of plagiarism is to use quotation marks, for example…

According to Ofsowitz, “it is occasionally considered acceptable to alter a word, and to change punctuation to fit the grammatical structure of one’s own sentence if the passage quoted is not a complete sentence, or otherwise incapable of standing on its own. However, to be safe, any alterations to the original should be shown within brackets, which is always acceptable“ (Ofsowitz, 2011, ¶ 5).

Actually, for lengthy quoted pieces (in excess of 40 words) you should indent it from both margins and then not use the quotation marks; this procedure of indenting is, like quotation marks, a signal to the reader that the material is quoted. (You wouldn’t make the quotation marks red like I did there – I did that only so they would stand out for you in this example.) Your use of quotation marks is telling the reader of your paper that you copied some wording from another source.

Now let’s say you changed the wording some…

According to Ofsowitz, sometimes it’s acceptable to change a word, or to alter punctuation so it fits your own sentence if the part quoted isn’t a full sentence. To be safe, though, any changes to the original should be shown inside brackets, which is always allowed (Ofsowitz, 2011).

Naughty, naughty. The problem there is that the basic wording is from the original and you only changed it here and there to make it not be a perfect match. Any reader can see that you were copying from the original. It is still plagiarism, even though it cites the source.

So what’s a desperate writer to do? Either quote exactly and use the quotation marks (along with a proper citation) or paraphrase by saying it in a completely different way (and then still showing a citation for the source of the information). For example, …

According to Ofsowitz, writers can make minor changes to the wording or punctuation of quoted material to fit their own sentences or grammatical needs, but these changes should be shown using brackets (Ofsowitz, 2011).

That’s a winner. It says what I said, but it said it in a very different way. It showed the source for the information as a citation. Nothing was quoted and nothing in that sentence needed to have been enclosed in quotation marks; it does not resemble the original in wording. Proper paraphrasing should be the method you choose when you want to incorporate the work of another source (whether a published paper or a website or an AI output) into your work.

So remember, if you copy, then copy exactly and show the reader that you copied the wording by using quotation marks (or indentation) and a citation. But copy wording like that only sparingly because it doesn’t help you to learn how to write or think. If you just use the information by paraphrasing the material, then don’t use wording that is even close to the original, but remember to show a citation.

Michael S. Ofsowitz, 2011/2025