What is Plagiarism?

(An Excerpt)
by Dr. Teresita Gimenez-Maceda
Philippine Daily Inquirer (Inquirer.net), 04 December 2010

(1) Every semester, at the start of every class, whether undergraduate or graduate, there is one rule I
emphasize: Do not plagiarize. I then go on to give a lecture on the “crime” of plagiarism.

(2) Simply explained, plagiarism is when you borrow someone else’s words and make these appear as
your own.

(3) But there are several ways of plagiarizing as there are many of detecting the deed.

(4) The first and most obvious kind of plagiarism is when a person copies verbatim or word for word a
sentence, a paragraph, a whole article, a section of a book, or different sections of a long article or
book written by another author, and does not enclose the copied words in quotation marks. Even if the
copier acknowledges in the bibliography the source of the copied words, the lack of quotation marks
within her/his own writing constitutes plagiarism.

(5) “I forgot to put the quotation marks” is no excuse.

(6) The second kind of plagiarism happens when a person borrows someone else’s ideas and rewords
them to make the ideas seem like her/his own. This becomes apparent when there is no attribution to
the original author. This means the person borrowing did not mark the reworded ideas of another writer
with a footnote or an endnote to acknowledge the original author of the idea/s.

(7) The third kind of plagiarism is when a person translates to Filipino or other Philippine languages
someone else’s ideas that were originally expressed in English or other foreign languages, and fails to
enclose the translated material in quotation marks.

(8) “But the Filipino words are mine,” the translator might claim. But the question remains:
Whose idea/s did the person translate?

(9) Even when a person frames the ideas of the original writer in another way or in a different language,
when she/he forgets to acknowledge the source of those idea/s, that still constitutes plagiarism.

(10) There is nothing wrong with borrowing an author’s ideas. We encourage students to research the
wealth of materials available in books or the Internet to expand their knowledge and help bolster their
own critical positions. We are often inspired by a writing style, a conceptual framework, a powerful idea.
We may even imitate the style or use the conceptual framework, or build on the powerful idea of other
writers and theorists.

(11) But we should never forget nor fail to give recognition to the person who inspired us, whose
conceptual framework we found applicable to our own research, or whose powerful idea stirred us to
develop our own. That is how knowledge grows. We may start to borrow (with proper
acknowledgement), but eventually, because we are creative individuals, we develop our own style, our
own expressions and way of thinking.

(12) I summarize my lecture on plagiarism with one Filipino word: KATAPATAN. It means honesty,
truthfulness, and integrity.

(13) I liken plagiarism to a mother who borrows a ganta of rice from a neighbor and forgets that what
saved her family for the day was the kindness of the neighbor. I think of plagiarism as lacking the
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Filipino value of “utangnaloob” (debt of gratitude). Who helped you gain the knowledge you have
today? Who aided you in becoming a better person by offering a different way of viewing things?

Telltale signs of plagiarism

(14) A plagiarist always leaves behind a trail of telltale signs. The teacher then becomes a detective
following the clues and gathering the evidence.

(15) Sometimes the trail begins with just a turn of phrase without quotation marks. The teacher
becomes suspicious especially if the student has never exhibited a clever use of words during the
semester. That turn of phrase may remind the teacher of a particular author’s writing style. Then the
plagiarism is sure to be discovered, for an author’s writing style is like a fingerprint. So, too, is the way
an author develops her/his ideas. As human beings, we may think alike, but we develop and express
our ideas in our own individual styles.

(16) At other times, the student may have become desperate (especially towards the end of the
semester) and so surfs for an article on the Net in a website s/he thinks is obscure enough. The student
then translates the entire article into Filipino, without the creativity of using his or her own examples.

(17) In the Internet age, it is easy for students to copy and paste. A political science professor, for
instance, had half of her class submitting an assignment with exactly the same wordings. And so I
stress to my students not to consider their teachers ignorant on the use of the Internet. I may be a
senior citizen, but I am as much of a techie as my young students. The Internet is a resource, but one
has to learn to sift through the deluge of information it offers. And even if the source is from the Net, a
student still has to acknowledge the website as her/his source of research material.

(18) Some students are not that clever in plagiarizing. I remember the case of a graduating student at
the Ateneo de Manila who submitted to me my own essay! I summoned him and he admitted he had
his girlfriend write his term paper. But he did not tell her who his teacher was! I gave him another
chance. Desperate, he plagiarized an article by BienvenidoLumbera published in the Fookien Times
Yearbook. This was too much. I gave him an “F” and reported the matter to the dean.

(19) We would like to think that graduate students would already have attained sufficient maturity and
independence of thinking so as not to commit plagiarism. That is not so. Three years ago, I caused two
Ph.D. students of mine in Philippine Studies to be removed from the program because of plagiarism.
One of them copied a paragraph from my own book but did not enclose it in quotation marks or attribute
to me the paragraph. I found myself staring at words that seemed so familiar, they could only have
been written by me. As if that were not enough, he submitted another paper that extracted excerpts
from just one work, pages from the beginning, the middle and toward the end, and wove them together,
submitting this as his paper. The telltale sign was again the writing style.

(20) The other Ph.D. student did exactly the same thing, passing off as his own extracts from different
sections of a book. How could graduate students think their teacher would not be able to discern their
plagiarism?

(21) In UP, we have been known to remove from our faculty roll a teacher who copied an American
textbook and simply changed the American names to Filipino names. Our University Council has also
withdrawn a Ph.D. degree from a graduate when overwhelming evidence showed that the dissertation
was 97 percent plagiarized. The Supreme Court upheld our autonomy in that case.

Ill effects of plagiarism

(22) Borrowing is not a crime. This is a statement I repeat over and over before giving my students their
assignment. But I always warn them never ever to fail to use quotation marks and the footnote or

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endnote when they borrow an author’s findings to support their own position, a writer’s wonderful turn of
phrase to enhance their own, or when they translate into Filipino a passage in English.

(23) Among undergraduate students, I believe that their plagiarism is borne more out of desperation
than malicious intent. But even without malicious intent, I consider plagiarism a bane. So for those
cases of which I have discovered evidence of plagiarism, I give a failing mark and tell the student never
to plagiarize again. I cannot emphasize it enough. Like liars, plagiarists are always found out because
they leave a trail of clues.

(24) Why do I rail against plagiarism? It is because claiming another one’s words is dishonest. The
original author must have spent much time developing her/his thoughts and expressing these in a style
uniquely her/his own. If the author discovers that someone else has copied her/his ideas, s/he can sue
the plagiarist under the intellectual property rights.

(25) If a plagiarist is not found out, it will become a habit and it will be easy for her/him to lie, cheat and
be corrupt. When a plagiarist is finally found out in her/his professional life, s/he can lose a job. But
worse, a plagiarist who eventually becomes corrupt would have lost her/his soul.

(26) Katapatan (honesty) is all that is required of us to keep our integrity and dignity intact.

Dr. Gimenez is a professor of Philippine Studies and Philippine Literature at the College of Arts and
Letters, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

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