Ways to Avoid Plagiarism
A Note about Plagiarism
"The words you use should be your own
Don't plagiarise or take "on loan"
'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall"
-- From the song "Cemetry Gates" on the album The Queen is Dead. Written and composed by Morrissey and Johnny Marr. Performed by The Smiths.
It is important to cite your sources properly. If you want to learn more about avoiding plagiarism, read the Plagiarism Guide.
When you are writing your paper, you can use several ways to present information you have found in the body of your paper, and consciously avoid plagiarizing.
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Direct quote
If you want to use a sentence or a passage exactly as it was written, you can include a direct quote, surrounded by quotation marks, and either using an inline citation, or a sentence before the quote referencing the author and work of origin.
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Summary
You can also write a summary (in your own words of course) of the ideas or text you want to use. It helps to write the summary from your memory rather than looking directly at the passage.
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Paraphrase
Paraphrasing is similar to a summary. It just means taking what you have read and rewriting it in your own words.
| Citation Management
Have a lot of citations you want to enter in your works cited/references list? Try a citation manager.
Do you need the Web or Desktop version?
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EndNoteA citation management tool that enables you to:
- Organize your research Include citations while you write your paper
- Build a bibliography in a variety of formats
- Import references from library databases and Google Scholar.
Print MLA Style Guides
Chicago Manual of Style Links
- The Chicago Manual of Style Online
- See their Quick Guide for the basics
- See an example of an annotated bibliography
- Writer's Handbook Chicago
- Chicago Guide from NW Missouri with examples from different databases.
Copies of The Chicago manual of Style are also avaliable at the Alkek Library and the Music Library.
Citing images:
The basic elements needed for citing images are as follows:
- artist's name, if known
- title of image, if known
- date work was created
- if date is unknown, place n.d. were the date would go
- permanent owner or institution where the artwork is housed
- the location or city
Citing Images Chicago Style from Colgate Visual Resources Library
Dartmouth's Citing Images handout
See Quick Guide to Citing Images from Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar
To see examples of how to cite images in MLA, see the An Image (Including a Painting, Sculpture, or Photograph) entry or the A Painting, Sculpture, or Photograph entry from Purdue's Online Writing Lab.
MLA style and citing sources
Calvin College: KnightCite Citation Service - fill in information about your resource and get an automatically generated works cited entry in MLA, APA, or Chicago styles
Northwest Missouri University: MLA Citation Style Examples - includes examples from specific databases
Purdue University: Online Writing Lab - lots of information about citing sources and writing papers in general
University of Wisconsin-Madison: MLA Documentation GuideFrom The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition
3.22 Formal titles in captions
Understanding a Journal Citation
You'll see something like this:
It's important to know the parts of a citation so you can interpret it correctly. You must have at least the Journal name, volume, issue, and page number to be able to locate the article.