Documentation

"Scholarly writers generously acknowledge their debts to predecessors by carefully giving credit to each source. Whenever you draw on another's work, you must specify what you borrowed -- whether facts, opinions, or quotations -- and where you borrowed it from. Using another person's ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source constitutes plagiarism.

Derived from the Latin word plagiarius ("Kidnapper"), plagiarism refers to a form of intellectual theft that has been defined as "the false assumption of authorship: the wrongful act of taking the product of another person's mind, and presenting it as one's own" (Alexander Lindley, Plagiarism and Originality [New York: Harper, 1952] 2). In short, to plagiarize is to give the impression that you wrote or thought something that you, in fact, borrowed from someone, and to do so is a violation of Professional ethics.

Forms of plagiarism include the failure to give appropriate acknowledgment when repeating another's wording or particularly apt phrase, paraphrasing another's argument, and presenting another's line of thinking. You may certainly use other person's words and thoughts, but the borrowed material must not appear to be your creation.

In your writing, then, you must document everything that you borrow: not only direct quotations and paraphrases but also information and ideas. Of course, common sense as well as ethics determines what you document. For example, you rarely need to give sources for familiar proverbs ("You can't judge a book by its cover"), well-known quotations ("We shall overcome"), or common knowledge ("Shakespeare was born during the Elizabethan Age"). But you must indicate the source or any appropriate material that reads might otherwise mistake for yours.

Plagiarism is a moral and ethical offense rather than a legal one. Most instances of plagiarism fall outside the scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense. Plagiarism remains an offense even if the plagiarized work is not covered by a copyright law or if the amount of material used and the nature of the use fall within the scope of fair use; copyright infringement remains a legal offense even if the violator acknowledges the source. The penalties for plagiarism can be severe, ranging from loss of respect to loss of degrees, tenure, or even employment. At all stages of research and writing, guard against the possibility of inadvertent plagiarism by keeping careful notes that distinguish between your musings and thoughts and the material you gather from others." (Gibaldi 151)

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Style Manual. 2nd ed. The Modern
Language Association of America. New York, 1998.