What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism refers to passing off others' ideas as your own, which can include many different things. Including:
- Using an essay found online
- Cheating off of or having a friend write a paper for you (including AI)
- Copying large chunks from research articles or AI-generated papers
However, a lot of times we often plagiarise unintentionally. This is because people don't fully understand plagiarism, and what it looks like. This guide is designed to assist you with your research and understanding how to correctly research, write and edit your essays while at Westmisnter.
Some Common Mistakes Include:
- Citing incorrectly
- Not using quotation marks for a direct quotation
- Paraphrasing but keeping the sentence almost exactly the same
- Switching between citation styles
- Reusing your own work without proper citation
- This includes reusing your own papers, or using parts of a paper you turned in for another class!
- Forgetting to provide citations for things like images, graphs, tweets, or video clips
- If you didn't create it from scratch, or it's not considered "common knowledge" (more on this later), it needs to be sited!
