Plagiarism: What It Is and How to Avoid It

All the information is from the IU code of student rights, responsibilities, and conduct.

Plagiarism is using other people's ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of information.

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use another person’s idea, opinion, or theory by putting quotation marks on everything that comes directly from the text. Also give credit when you are using quotations from another person’s spoken or written ideas or words. You must also give credit when you use facts, statistics, graphs, drawings or any other pieces of information that are not common knowledge. Another way to avoid plagiarism is to paraphrase the information. Paraphrasing is a good strategy to avoid plagiarism.

Paraphrasing is when the writer uses his/her own words and let’s the reader know the source of information. Paraphrasing is not just rearranging or replacing a few words. All the information from the original writing must be recorded accurately. To paraphrase the writer must indicate which parts are taken directly from the source by putting them in quotation marks and citing the page numbers. It is good to check your paraphrase against the original text to make sure you have not accidentally used the same words, and that the information is accurate.