Educating The Prince (Fall 2016): Avoiding Plagiarism

Online documents make it very easy to cut and paste information without thinking and without giving proper credit. Make sure you understand how to cite your sources.

You can create your own MLA and APA formated citations by consulting your class textbook or reviewing the information at the OWL at Purdue.

Also, consider making an appointment at The Writing Center!

When it is time to gather all of your notes and start writing the paper, avoid the most common mistake - plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only taking large parts of someone else's work and not attributing credit to that author; paraphrasing sections of a work, even using synonyms and citing the work, is also plagiarism.

• Use direct quotations to support the paper's thesis.
• Rethink and rewrite the author's original idea and express it in a new way.

Even if the ideas are rewritten, the source of the idea must be cited and the author given credit.

For further information, see

• Albright Library's guide to Citation Tools (free online options)
• interactive site at University of Texas at Austin
• interactive site at Prentice Hall publishers
• or the material on paraphrasing from the OWL at Purdue.