Recognizing and preventing plagiarism (p. 255)

The Writing Place at Northwestern University offers detailed information about what plagiarism is and how to avoid both intentional and unintentional plagiarism on their Avoiding Plagiarism page.

• Cite every piece of information that is not a) the result of your own primary research, or b) common knowledge. This includes opinions, arguments, and speculations as well as facts, details, figures, and statistics.
• Use quotation marks every time you use the author's words. (For longer quotes, indenting the whole quotation has the same effect as quotation marks.)
• At the beginning of the first sentence in which you quote, paraphrase, or summarize, make it clear that what comes next is someone else's idea.

The site also identifies two of the most common ways that students unintentionally plagiarize: either paraphrasing a source without citing it, or misplacing citations. One easy way to avoid these problems is to take accurate notes from your sources so that you can easily identify quotes (in the original author’s words) and paraphrases (in your own words).