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Questions to consider:
View the following video: Avoiding Plagiarism (YouTube, 2:20)
Avoiding plagiarism and properly crediting your sources is an essential skill for success in both college and the workplace. Knowing when and how to give credit when using someone's ideas is the very first step in being a good writer, but also in being a responsible citizen and continuous learner.
Whether done on purpose or accidentally, plagiarism and academic dishonesty can come with serious academic consequences (Empire University policy). These are all examples of plagiarism or academic dishonesty:
Best practices for avoiding plagiarism:
In academic writing in APA style, there are several required citation elements:
Read this brief example snippet of a (made up) paper using APA in-text citations. There are 2 instances in this example of plagiarism or incomplete citing - can you spot them?
Students rely too heavily on web pages for their academic writing sources. Williamson (2009), writes that, in the undergraduate paper samples studied, nearly 60% of cited sources pointed to commercial websites rather than more reliable academic sources (p. 22). The problem, however, comes with some ethical grey areas. "This reliance on web content represents a dilemma for many professors because academic content is much harder to access once students graduate and no longer have access to university libraries."
Jones & Falcon (2022) show that there is a possible high school-to-college transition influence on this issue, writing that "almost all junior and senior high school assignments examined showed a heavy reliance on shallow surface information" taken from the top results of Google searches (pp. 102-103). Several recent studies highlight possible remedies to this, using a combination of required College Writing course assignments, writing center outreach, and or library instruction. This paper will argue that in addition to... [note: the text and sources here are for example purposes only; they are not real]