Unit 2: Plagiarism

 Questions from the Purdue Owl: Avoiding Plagiarism

1. Last summer, my family and I traveled to Chicago, which was quite different from the rural area I grew up in. We saw the dinosaur Sue at the Field Museum, and ate pizza at Gino's East.
A. the passage is a direct experience of the person, and is properly cited.

 2. Americans want to create a more perfect union; they also want to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for everybody.

A. The passage gives general over view of what other people want, like results from many surveys, this would need to be cited with sources of where the information is gathered from unless it is previously stated as the users general opinion.

3. I find it ridiculous that 57% of high school students think their teachers assign too much homework.
A. Using statistics, these need to be cited.

4. Martin Luther King was certain that nobody would want to be contented with a surfacy type of social analysis that concerns itself only with effects and doesn't deal with root causes.
A. The passage is missing citation

5. Martin Luther King wrote that the city of Birmingham's "white power structure" left African-Americans there "no alternative" but to demonstrate ("Letter from the Birmingham Jail" para. 5).
 A. The passage refers directly to the letter and cites the paragraph.

6. In "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," King writes to fellow clergy saying that although they "deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham, your statement fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations."
A.the passage is not properly cited in any style.

7. My friend Kara told me that she loves living so close to the ocean.
A. this is  conversation and does not need citation.

8. Americans are guaranteed the right to freely gather for peaceful meetings.
A. this is general fact and does not need a citation.

Often as soon as you find information about a subject you need to be careful to give credit for the information that you are sharing. Learning about a subject is the key, if you already did not invent the idea or create the finished product making sure that you give proper credit to those who did is the very best way to avoid plagiarism.

There are several types of ways to give credit to the original source, it depends on what you are citing, and the type of bibliography that is appropriate to use with you document. This does not exclude art work, graphs or any other kind of supporting exhibits.

When giving a speech is is especially important to provide the audience the source of your information. By doing this you are being not only an ethical speaker you are making sure to give proper credit for the concepts that you are speaking about.

The primary guidelines that are shown in the Iris tutorial are to collect, organize and punctuate your citations. there are a variety of citation styles to use the following are the most common according to the Iris module on plagiarism:                            

• MLA - often used in English classes
• APA - often used in psychology and social sciences classes
• Chicago Manual of Style - often used with Humanities (English, Art, History)
• ACS (American Chemical Society) - chemistry
• CSE (Council of Science Editors) - biology and science

The particular styles that I have used for research papers are MLA, and APA styles. and the MS Word program provides a very useful tool to help in the proper formatting of these styles.