There are two kinds of plagiarism: malicious or accidental.
Malicious plagiarism is when you intentionally copy or use another's work as your own.
Some examples of malicious plagiarism include:
- Buying a paper from a website or research service.
- Copying an article or an essay (the whole thing or parts of it).
- Having a friend, parent, tutor, etc. write all or part of your paper for you.
- Using a paper you wrote for a previous class again without your instructor's permission.
- Writing a paper yourself, but not citing the outside sources you used.
- Copying and pasting large (or small) chunks of an outside source into your paper without using quotes or citations.
- Citing outside sources incorrectly -- meaning that you credit the wrong source or that you credit information to a particular outside source even though that information came from a different source.
If you are caught committing any of these acts, the consequences are very serious. The good news is that malicious plagiarism is easy to avoid. Simply make yourself aware that it is wrong to buy, copy, or use people's work without correctly citing them as outside resources.
Check out the video on your screen. While this sketch from Saturday Night Live is meant to be funny, each of the students' essays are examples of malicious plagiarism.
