Researched Writing: Citing Sources
Charles Turner
It's amazing. Students don't understand, for example, what it means to plagiarize work. They have no clue. They'll say, well if I change the words, a word here or there, then that's not plagiarism. They don't know what to cite. They haven't been taught that, and if they have they've forgotten or they just don't take it to heart. It's an amazing process.

Santi Buscemi
And there have been people who have pursued PhDs who have copied things right out of textbooks without…and claimed it's their own research. And they've lost their PhDs and are drummed out of academia. Whole careers have been ruined because of that. So… most of our students are pretty good I think. And most of the time what they commit is unintentional plagiarism.

Mike Gratton
Well, first of all, we were plagiarizing a lot when we were little. Our teacher would just say, "Here's some books, make a report." So we figured the easiest way to do it was just copy straight out if the book, put some stuff together, and there's our paper. And then, once we got into high school, they said you can't really do that. But still in high school they'd never really check for it. So…you're thinking as long as I'm not getting caught, what difference does it make? And then when you get to college they yell at you. The first thing that they emphasize is that you can't plagiarize, you're gonna be thrown in jail, you're gonna be thrown out of school, and they really hit you hard with it. So, in fact Mr. Bertsch spent a couple weeks showing us how to just go through a paper and like look at sentences and say, "Well this person is saying this and he's also saying this but you don't need this part of it so you extract what you need and you can put it in your own words." So in fact he…we even had exercises where we take an entire article and condense it down to one sentence.

David Ellefson
When I was reading books, reading textbooks and whatnot for research, especially with the financial charts and some of those things, yeah, I had to be careful that… not to plagiarize. I remember doing book reports in school where I was, either didn't like the book or wasn't into the assignments, and would probably just flat out right steal some lines right out of there just to get a grade. Those are probably the ones I got the worst grades on too, because you can tell someone's authenticity in their writing, you can tell whether they're just blatantly robbing somebody or whether it's their own words because if they have a certain character and style about their writing, all of a sudden there's a whole new style, it's like wait a minute, is that like a little cut and paste, you know, what was that?

Joe Harris
There are two writing conventions that help distinguish plagiarism from simply dealing well with sources. The first are the conventions of documentation, and what I always tell students is that when in doubt, overdo it. If you think you might be summarizing somebody rather than simply…rather than adding your own ideas, then say so. You gotta refer to the pages where these ideas roughly appear. You'll never be penalized for that. Finally, you want to ask the teacher if you're not sure, and there will often be cases where you're not sure. Go up to the teacher and say, "I didn't know how to document this, much of these are my ideas, some of them are the ideas from the writer I was reading. How can I sort those through?" If you're working on it like that, nobody's gonna call you a plagiarist. It's when you try to again, sort of bury it or get by, or let it slide that you move into iffy territory.

Sarah Blakeslee
Every discipline has their own style. English uses MLA, psychology uses APA. There are more questions at the desk about that than probably about anything else. I need to write this bibliography, how do I do it? I try to tell my students to not get too wrapped up in it. We have books, they follow the books, and to know the purpose behind the citations or the works cited—is so that somebody can come after you and find the source that you're referring to.