What is plagiarism and why is it important?

As you do research, you are in reality reading work produced by someone else. Plagiarism is the use of another person's ideas or words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information. If you do not give the author credit, you are stealing his/her product. Any time an entire sentence written by someone else is used by you, it should be placed in quotations and the source acknowledged.

How Can You Avoid Plagiarism?

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use:

• another person's idea, opinion, or theory;
• any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings--any pieces of information--that are not common knowledge;
• quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words;
• paraphrase another person's spoken or written words.
  (from the Indiana University Student Handbook)

 IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM THE BHS ENGLISH DEPARTMENT:

It is the position of the English Department that five or more consecutive words borrowed from any source should be considered plagiarism unless properly cited and placed within quotation marks.

The English Department's policy is to give a ZERO on any assignment that is partially or fully plagiarized.  If a student is caught plagiarizing, that grade/assignment CANNOT be made up!

One simple way to check for plagiarism is via Google:

• Go to Google.com
• Type the five word phrase you most suspect of being plagiarized in the search box.
• Put quotation marks around the phrase in order to search for that exact phrase.