Picture this: You’ve invited some friends over for dinner. Since you didn’t have time to make a dessert, you stop at a local bakery and buy a cake. After dinner, your friends congratulate you on the delicious cake you made. How do you answer? Most people would credit the person who made the cake: “I’m glad you liked it, but I didn’t. I bought it at Sunshine Bakery.” By clarifying that the cake was not yours, you are giving credit to Sunshine Bakery. The same concept is true in writing.
When you write a paragraph or an essay, you should use your own words for the most part. Sometimes, however, writers want to use ideas they’ve read about in another piece of writing. For example, a writer may want to use a quote from a famous politician if he is writing a paragraph about a recent election. In this case, the writer must indicate that the words are not their own, but come from someone else, and give credit to that writer. The action of indicating that a writer’s words are not original but from another source is called quoting. In academic writing, it is imperative that a writer cite all non-original sources of information.
If writers don’t give credit for borrowed ideas or borrowed words, they’re making a serious mistake. In fact, it is academic theft, and such theft of ideas or words is not tolerated at all. It is not acceptable to use even a few words from another source without citing the source; the amount of information you borrow is irrelevant. Stealing is stealing. If you steal a sentence or even a sentence from another source, it is still considered theft. Stealing someone else’s ideas or words and using them in writing as if they were your original ideas is called plagiarism. In the academic field, plagiarism is considered a very serious infraction. In most schools, there are serious academic consequences for plagiarizing any work. For example, some schools require that work receive a grade of 0 (zero). Other schools will expel the student permanently. In some cases, schools will take both steps above.
So does this mean that writers can’t use other people’s words or ideas? Not at all. In fact, a writer’s key points can be strengthened by using data from outside sources or quotes from experts. Accordingly, writers are encouraged to borrow appropriate information. The key to avoiding plagiarism is to cite the source of the information.
Many students have difficulty knowing when to use a citation, especially if they believe the information is general knowledge. For example, Hessa, a student from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is writing an essay about her country. She knows that the United Arab Emirates is made up of seven emirates. Do you need to cite this information? If Hessa is writing this essay in an English-speaking country where people may not know that there are seven emirates, she needs to cite the information. However, if the information is common knowledge in Hessa’s academic community, she would not have to cite the information.
In the end, it’s better to cite information than risk being accused of plagiarism. Before turning in any writing, it is helpful to mark any information that is not your original writing. For any information you check, you must give credit to the person, organization, or website that originally wrote it by citing those sources.