Word Choices

"To be or not to be, that is the question."

Most students already know that if they take the words for their writing directly from a source then they have to use those little "marks" around the quote. By the time they are in high school, this is a fairly basic understanding, and they know to give credit for the quotation.

I have a dream of everybody getting along and living, working, and going to school together.

But what to do when you use the idea in someone else's work? Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't say that statement exactly, so now what? Many students would know, correctly, not to put the quotation marks around it. However, they often don't do what needs to be done. When students paraphrase someone else's words, sometimes they are not aware of the need to give credit for the idea in the same way they would for a direct quote.

And that is why I reinvented the wheel this week (with the help of a couple of wonderful library assistants). There are a lot of different resources out there about plagiarism, but I enjoy doing things my own way. That is why the newest video in my animation collection is on plagiarism. My hope is to give students an overview of how borrowing the written or recorded thoughts of another person, even if it's not word-for-word, can also be plagiarism if they do not use citations and show it is paraphrasing. So give credit where credit is due, cite within your work when necessary, and use your own original ideas the majority of the time!

Enjoy!