Earlier this week I was chatting with one of my colleagues about Time magazine’s suspension of respected writer and CNN TV host Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism. It got me thinking about the topic and I decided it might be helpful to offer a reminder of what plagiarism is as well as tips on how to avoid it.
I found an insightful website created by Plagiarism.org, a subsidiary of iParadigms, LLC, a company developing web-based solutions to prevent plagiarism. On the site, you’ll find a definition of plagiarism from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. According to Merriam-Webster, to “plagiarize” means to:
- steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
- use (another’s production) without crediting the source
- commit literary theft
- present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
Plagiarism.org goes a step further to explain that “plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.”
The Associated Press posts the following statement on its website: “An AP staffer who reports and writes a story must use original content, language and phrasing. We do not plagiarize, meaning that we do not take the work of others and pass it off as our own.”
Clearly with the amount of information available on the Internet it is easy to access the ideas of others. So how does one avoid making a mistake and being accused of plagiarism? Citing sources and giving credit to others is the name of the game.
To aid all of us who write, the Plagiarism.org website also provides resources for people who are striving to maintain the integrity of their written work. There are several pages devoted to topics such as when to cite sources, how to determine if information is common knowledge, and how to cite material. While much of this information appears to be written for students, there are some good tips for those of us writing for work or fun. When in doubt, it is always better to be safe than sorry and cite sources.