The health and integrity of any school rests upon students and faculty upholding certain moral principles. One principle is academic freedom, the right to think and speak freely without fear of censorship. Another, no less important in an academic community, is honesty.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, plagiarism means "to steal and use (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own." The English & Creative Writing Dept. understands that some knowledge is culturally shared, and that it is natural to learn from teachers and fellow students. At the same time, there is a distinction between learning from someone else and using that person's words or ideas as if to suggest that they are one's own. As the same dictionary points out, the word "plagiary" comes from the Latin for "kidnapper." That is why it is so important to learn to document one's sources properly; one must be very careful to avoid kidnapping the words and ideas of another without giving proper credit. It is also important to realize that plagiarism is plagiarism, whether it is intentional or unintentional.

You are plagiarizing if you do the following:

1) Incomplete paraphrasing. If you use substantive words, phrases, or rhetorical structures from your source without documentation, you are plagiarizing. Whether you "kidnap" one or two words or a whole page, you are plagiarizing.

According to Floyd C. Watkins and William B. Dillingham, "A good paraphrase expresses the ideas found in the source (for which credit is always given) but not in the same words. It preserves the sense, but not the form, of the original. It does not retain the sentence patterns and merely substitute synonyms for the original words, nor does it retain the original words and merely alter the sentence patterns. It is a genuine restatement. It is briefer than its source" (357-58).

At Susquehanna, the most common cases of plagiarism occur because of faulty paraphrasing. In many cases, the students who do this are not aware that they are plagiarizing. For this reason, the Department of English has made a commitment to teach all our students the proper use of intellectual property. We do not think that most students want to plagiarize. How to avoid unintentional plagiary is the biggest problem we face. To paraphrase well and accurately, you must: a) CITE the original source. b) REWORD the original source. c) RESTRUCTURE the original statement.

2) Missing citation. If you use any ideas that are clearly NOT common knowledge without citing your source, you are plagiarizing. It does not matter whether you've expressed the ideas in your own language.

3) Copying. If you simply copy from any source without quotation marks or attribution, you are plagiarizing.

Among the practices which constitute plagiarism are: using in their entirety or even in part recycled papers or papers from another course or teacher or papers written by someone else, either by a student or a person publishing a paper in an academic journal or book. This includes unverified attribution to works such as Cliff's Notes or Monarch Notes.

In A Pocket Style Manual, Diana Hacker writes this about academic honesty:

In research writing, you document sources to let readers know where your information came from and to give credit to writers whose words and ideas you have borrowed. To borrow another's words and ideas without proper acknowledgement is a form of dishonesty known as plagiarism. To avoid plagiarism, you must cite all quotations, summaries and paraphrases as well as any facts or ideas that are not common knowledge. In addition, you must be careful to put quotations in quotation marks and to express all paraphrases and summaries in your own words. Quotations must be copied accurately, word for word, and they must be placed in quotation marks unless they have been set off from the text. (83) N.B. Since the quotation above is set off from the text, it does not require quotation marks. This is standard practice.

The best advice is to cite all sources as clearly as possible in all matters except shared common knowledge. You may discover that there is some disagreement among scholars concerning the definition of common knowledge. If you are at all in doubt, ask your teacher.