The Lynch School of Education defines plagiarism as follows: Plagiarism is the deliberate act of taking the words, ideas, data, illustrative material, or statements of someone else, without full and proper acknowledgment and presenting them as one’s own.
Take excellent notes. Plagiarism often stems from sloppy research and subsequent rewriting rather than a deliberate desire to cheat. Nevertheless, even unintentional failure to cite sources correctly and honestly may constitute plagiarism. Many students mistakenly take bad notes during the research process. They write someone else’s text verbatim on a card or on their computer and forget quotation marks. When they write the paper and refer to their notes, they forget the text on the card or computer is another author’s and not their own. Any reader who recognizes the original text believes that the student has cheated. This can lead to tough penalties.
