Plagiarism is stealing someone else's words or ideas, and it is absolutely illegal in the academic world. Plagiarizing completely undermines the purpose of education: learning to think for yourself. Teachers expect nothing less than your own original and creative work; plagiarism is exactly the opposite of those expectations.
Let's look at the University's policy on plagiarism, which can be found in the Undergraduate Catalog:
Plagiarism- the use of another's words without attribution and without enclosing the words in quotation marks. Plagiarism may also be defined as the act of taking the ideas or expression of ideas of another person and representing them as one's own- even if the original paper has been paraphrased or otherwise modified. A close or extended paraphrase may also be considered plagiarism even if the source is named. (16)
Many people plagiarize because they don't know how to acknowledge a source. There are three ways to acknowledge a source and safeguard against plagiarism in your work: quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing. By using one of these methods, you (as a writer) are paying for borrowed words and ideas to supplement your own.
