Plagiarism: What Is It? How Do I Avoid It?

Avoid plagiarism by

• doing the work yourself
• giving proper credit to words or ideas that you did not create yourself
• recognizing that direct quotation (with citation) and paraphrase (with citation) are both acceptable ways to use outside material.

Avoid the panic that makes cheating look so attractive by

• starting early (college students should plan at least 2 hours of homework for each hour of class)
• keeping on track (with brainstorming, drafting, workshop, and revision assignments)
• seeking out help (from your instructor or supervisor, or mentors within your organization, such as your university’s writing center)

Legitimate universities respond seriously to any sign that a student — through dishonesty, carelessness, or lack of knowledge— has compromised his or her academic integrity. Procedures vary from school to school, but in general,

• A student may be permitted to resubmit an assignment, and/or may be given a grade penalty ranging from a few points on the assignment to failure of the course.
• Independent of any action from the professor, the administration may also choose to suspend or expel the student (especially in the case of multiple offenses).

In the real world, plagiarism (and/or falsifying or misrepresenting sources) will get you fired, even if you “didn’t mean to do it.”

Can I Use Other People’s Ideas in My Own Work?

Yes! You just have to make it clear to your reader where exactly you got each idea (or phrase, or sentence, or paragraph) that you didn’t create yourself.

Citing sources accurately and fairly is a fundamental skill of critical thinking.

Only one person, on one occasion, has composed (from scratch) these exact words:

A photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by tweaking the color and tone of the image in the darkroom.

Because I use these words in my own document, I have the moral obligation to identify the source. In the context of academic writing, I’m obligated to give the reader all the information he or she needs in order to locate the full original, which was “I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop,” by Alex Williams, published in the New York Times, 15 Aug 2008.

If your name is on the submission, you are claiming all the ideas in it, unless you explicitly state that a certain stretch of words, or sentences, or ideas are really the creative work of somebody else.

On the other hand, there are only so many ways you can say a basic, well-known fact like “earth is the third planet from the sun,” or a widely-held opinion like “baseball is America’s pastime.”  If you rely heavily on those kinds of stock phrases, your professors and editors might be concerned that your writing lacks a personal voice or an original perspective, but those are not matters of academic integrity.

What Is Plagiarism? What Is Not Plagiarism?

• When a Harvard-bound valedictorian re-uses long passages from presidential speeches, without identifying the source, that’s plagiarism. (In 2003, Blair Hornstine found her admission to Harvard rescinded when this honesty issue came to light.)
• When a TV reporter records an item that was written by a different reporter (and does not credit the original source), that’s plagiarism. (A CBS producer was fired after Katie Couric recorded an item that originally appeared in the New York Times.)
• When a student re-uses a statement of a widely-known fact, such as “Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter,” that’s not plagiarism. (It’s not original, or expressive, but depending on the assignment, that might not be an issue… ask your professor.)
• In the summer of 2023, a Manhattan lawyer with 30 years experience was working on a document on behalf of his client. To save time, he asked ChatGPT to provide him with some sources. He didn’t actually check those sources himself, he just threw them into his document. That was professional misconduct. “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told the judge.
  • At a public hearing, the judge read a passage ChatGPT had provided and said, “Can we agree that’s legal gibberish?”
  • The lawyer, Steven A. Schwartz, was fined thousands of dollars and forced to write letters of apology to the real judges whose names ChatGPT attached to rulings it fabricated.
    
  • Text-generation bots often give answers that sound plausible and confident on the surface, but they don’t really care about accuracy or ethics because they are only observing and remixing bits and pieces of the human-created textual exchanges they’ve been trained on.
• Some instructors may define plagiarism as re-using more than three consecutive words without citing the source. I personally don’t find that definition useful… here’s why:
  • What if you are writing about “The United States of America”?  That’s five words, but that’s not plagiarism.  (A definition based on word counts misses the point, since honest scholarship involves acknowledging the source of other people’s ideas, not just their exact words.)
  • What about if you quote song lyrics, or advertising slogans, or pop-culture catchphrases, or grab a photo from the internet for your PowerPoint presentation, without citing your source? Your professor may or may not recognize the reference, so it’s a good idea to get into the habit of citing. (Good writers are aware of the needs of their audiences, and academic audiences often require thorough and complete citations.)

Turnitin.com has accused me of plagiarizing (or using AI)! What do I do?

Turnitin.com is not a judge; it is simply one of many tools that instructors can use when we try to gauge whether students are learning the material. It reports what percentage of a document it has encountered elsewhere, and what percentage closely matches the output of a text-generation algorithm.

You should expect that your school’s administration will never act on the Turnitin.com report without carefully investigating.

If you took a draft of your in-progress paper to the writing center, or you brought it to class for a peer-review session, or you saved a draft of your in-progress paper, you could offer to meet with your professor and speak knowledgeably and intelligently about the writing choices that you made as your document developed. 

Imagine you are a student who started an assignment by writing a few paragraphs yourself, but then

• you ran it through a grammar checker
• you asked a bot to help you with your tone,
• you asked a bot to help you with organization and transitions
• you asked for help beefing up your opposing view
• you asked a bot to suggest a strong conclusion.

In this case, every time you accept a suggestion generated by a bot, that makes your paper just that much more similar to the kind of paper a bot would produce, and therefore just a little bit more prone to be flagged as “likely generated by AI.” (And by the way, all the text spinners were trained on the same data, and they follow an algorithm, too.)

This is why I ask my own students to check with me before they even consider using AI on any project, so that they carefully document, at every step of the what, what parts of a project are their own work, and what parts they should cite as the contributions of a text-generation algorithm.

Recently I had a student who was so proud of her idea for a paper that she put it on her blog, and invited her peers to give her feedback. Turnitin.com flagged her full paper as “unoriginal” because it had noticed those parts that first appeared on her blog. (The student was never at any risk of being punished, because I know how to interpret Turnitin.com’s feedback, and could clearly see that she was the author of the material Turnitin.com treated as the source.)