Plagiarism is taking someone's words and/or ideas and presenting them as your own. Even in the digital age when copying, pasting, and sharing are prevalent and so easy to do, people still care about plagiarism. Why?
Plagiarism is not about the copying and pasting. It's about doing the work and giving credit to others for their work. It's about integrity.
When you plagiarize, you are actually passing up an opportunity for growth in your knowledge and understanding of a topic. Sometimes growth is hard. That's OK! It's better to struggle doing your own work honestly than to breeze through a class not actually learning anything.
If we, as Governor Mifflin Schools, didn't do anything to teach students about plagiarism, and we didn't hold students accountable when we find plagiarism, we would be damaging the reputation and the integrity of our institution. It's up to all of us to keep Mustang Nation strong and academically honest.
Always read all assignment directions carefully and confirm with your teacher what his or her requirements for citation are. Even if a teacher does not require that you use a formal citation style like MLA 9th edition, or APA 6th edition, you should provide some indication of the source of any outside information you use in your product.
Paraphrasing is a skill in which you capture the essence of another writer's idea in your own words, while still giving all appropriate credit to the original author. It is useful to know how to paraphrase so that you can vary your sentences and make your writing more interesting as you demonstrate your understanding of existing literature.
To create formal citations you need some information about the works you are citing. A cool name for that is metadata - or information about the information. NoodleTools will collect and format that data for you, but you need to be ready to answer some questions. First: What kind of source am I using? Watch this video to learn how to identify common secondary sources.
Once you have identified the source you are citing, you must find those pieces of metadata that you need to create a proper citation. If you're not sure where within the source to look, watch this video: