An essential rule in any university class is that all printed and spoken work which a student submits should be entirely his/her own, or properly documented. If it is not, the student is guilty of plagiarism. The following are two types of plagiarism that the student should be aware of:
- Word for word copying, without acknowledgement, of the language of another person. Obviously, having another person write or dictate all or part of one’s printed or oral work is plagiarism of this kind. In addition, a student should copy NO printed, spoken or electronic passage, no matter how brief, without acknowledging its source. This applies to even the briefest of phrases if they are truly individual and distinctive.
- Another type of plagiarism is the unacknowledged paraphrasing of another’s ideas. A student should no more take credit for another’s thoughts than for another’s language. Any distinctively original idea taken from another should be credited to its author. If the student does not know whether another’s idea is distinctively original, he/she should incline to believe that it is; no fault attaches to over-acknowledgement, but under-acknowledgement is plagiarism.