The art of avoiding plagiarism

Harriet Swain The Guardian, Tuesday October 7 2008

The best way to avoid plagiarism is to avoid reading anything written by somebody else. Unfortunately,
this is not really what higher education is supposed to be about. While university teachers prize
originality, they are not so keen on students relying entirely on imagination. By original thought, they
tend to mean thinking something new about the thoughts of lots of other people, rather than just
making it up.

So you need to remember two things: first, that not all the brilliant insights you use in your assignment
will be your own; and second, the names of all those other people involved so you can give them a
mention.

This comes down to efficient note-taking. Always write down the source of anything you consult,
including that clever third-year who wrote a similar essay last year. Be methodical and accurate. Note
the title of a book or website reference, author, date and page number so that you, and anybody else,
will be able to check later where a particular idea came from. You also need to ask about the referencing
rules of your institution and/or tutor and make sure you keep to them.

When making notes, distinguish between your own profound thoughts on the text and the text itself.
The text is usually the one that's a lot longer. This is your chance to devise a colour-coded system of
notes to differentiate your thoughts, those of an author, and those of your tutor. Don't make it so
complicated that you keep forgetting which is which colour.

It is also the time to use plenty of quotation marks so you know what are direct lifts and what you have
put in your own words. Don't forget that even if you paraphrase someone else's ideas you still need to
mention whose they are. And even if you acknowledge the source properly, an essay still counts as
someone else's work if you find you need quotation marks around the whole thing - or even around
most of it.

When paraphrasing an argument, it is a good idea to close the book you are consulting to make sure you
are not copying it by mistake. (This technique is less useful if you sneak a few peaks or have a really
good memory.)

If you cut and paste from a website, you are definitely copying, even if you remember to reformat it so it
looks like the rest of your essay, and change the spelling from American to English. If you don't even
remember to take these steps you deserve all you get.

And you could be caught, warns Jude Carroll, who has written a handbook on deterring plagiarism in
higher education. She says that any "smoking guns", such as different fonts, spacing and margins, or
anachronisms left in an essay, will force teachers to report you because their self-esteem won't allow
anything else.

In any case, most teachers now use plagiarism detection software that may well catch you out.

You don't need to worry about giving a reference if you refer to a fact that is commonly known. But a
commonly known fact is not the same thing as something that is commonly available on the internet, or
that everyone else in your class knows because they heard it from that clever third year.

Even if you don't feel guilty, always read through an assignment to check that you haven't plagiarised
accidentally. Make sure you have cited a source every time you use it, and look closely at any paragraphs
without references to see if they really are all your own work or should be attributed to that helpful
internet essay bank.