Plagiarism

^{Image Source}

Google defines plagiarism as "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own." ^Source Plagiarism is fraud, pure and simple.

Examples of Plagiarism

There are many ways in which people plagiarize works by others. Some examples are: quoting another's work without making it clear that it is a quote, for instance by not putting quotation marks around it; quoting without citing the source; copying and pasting anything including pictures, video, audio, text, any media, without citing or in such a way as to make it look like one's own; and paraphrasing another person's work to make it appear original.

Many people do not realize that paraphrasing someone's work rather than making an original statement is plagiarism. You can use others' work to create your own ideas (we all do-- that's how we learn), but to simply paraphrase from their work by rearranging words is illegal.

I want to draw on Missouri State University's instructions on plagiarism:

Consider the following example sentence:

With money from the state lottery, Georgia guarantees preschool classes for every fouryear-old child.

If you want to use this quote exactly as it appears in the February 3, 1997, Newsweek article “Some Hope for College” by Daniel Pedersen and Pat Wingert, you must place quotes around the sentence and add some accepted form of documentation. ...
A paraphrase that uses the author’s words or the same pattern of words is considered plagiarism also. The following examples are not acceptable paraphrases, even if you give the author credit:

With funds from its own lottery, Georgia promises preschool courses for all youngsters (Pedersen and Wingert 44).
Georgia guarantees classes for each preschool with money from its state lottery (Pedersen and Wingert 44).

^{Source: Missouri State}

We need to be careful how we quote, include, and paraphrase others' work. As I stated, using others' material to learn and assimilate the ideas into your own is learning and is encouraged. Making others' ideas seem your own is illicit.

I want to make one final observation: I have read several Achievement 3 posts here on Steemit, and I noticed that the source citations on people's posts were faulty. For example, people cited Google as their source, when the source, albeit discovered through Google, was not Google. Folks, if you google something and get an image, cite the source of the image, not the google search.

I hope that this guide to recognizing and avoiding plagiarism, and particularly to properly paraphrasing, has been helpful.

I have read and understood "The Complete Steemit Etiquette Guide (Revision 2.0) -Homage" in #Steem within the Steemit Community and I always embrace this etiquette.

Thanks to the Steemit community, especially to Cryptokannon and the curators for creating and curating this achievement.
~Alex