Bailey.Academic_Writing

1.2 Avoiding Plagiarism
All students have to face the issue of plagiarism. Plagiarism means
taking information or ideas from another writer and using them in
your own work, without acknowledging the source in an accepted
manner. In academic work plagiarism can be a serious offence. This
unit outlines the situation, but to fully avoid plagiarism students need
to master the skills practised in units 1.6–1.10.
cross-reference
2.11 References and
Quotations
3.22 Verbs of Reference
1. Which of the following would be considered as plagiarism?
a) Not providing a reference when you have used
somebody’s idea.
b) Copying a few sentences from an article on the internet
without giving a reference.
c) Not giving a reference when you use commonly accepted
ideas, e.g. Aids is a growing problem.
d) Giving the reference but not using quotation marks when
you take a sentence from another writer’s article.
e) Taking a paragraph from a classmate’s essay without
giving a reference.
f) Presenting the results of your own research.
2. To avoid plagiarism, and also to save having lengthy
quotations in your work, it is necessary to paraphrase and
summarise the original. Instead of this, students sometimes
hope that changing a few words of the original will avoid
charges of plagiarism. Clearly, you are not expected to alter
every word of the original text, but your summary must be
substantially different from the original.
Read the following extract on twentieth-century educational
developments from Age of Extremes by E. Hobsbawm:
Almost as dramatic as the decline and fall of the
peasantry, and much more universal, was the rise of
the occupations which required secondary and higher
education. Universal primary education, i.e. basic literacy,
was indeed the aspiration of virtually all governments, so
much so that by the late 1980s only the most honest or
helpless states admitted to having as many as half their
population illiterate, and only ten – all but Afghanistan in
Africa – were prepared to concede that less than 20% of
their population could read or write. (Hobsbawm, 1994, p.
295)
Which of the following are plagiarised and which are
acceptable?
a) Almost as dramatic as the decline and fall of the
peasantry, and much more general, was the rise of
the professions which required secondary and higher
education. Primary education for all, i.e. basic literacy,