Paraphrasing and Plagiarism

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Thinking Mother has a nice post on plagiarism. I've been reading a book written to classroom teachers about handling plagiarism in the classroom. One of the things I noted in both the blog and the original article on plagiarism was the focus on blatant copying. This is something that is pretty easy to teach. Don't copy. Yes, even if you change a few words, it's still copying.

But there's no mention in either article of what I suspect is a much more common form of plagiarism. In fact one of the comments following the blog describes a writing program that trains students to paraphrase. I may be misreading the writer's intent, but it seems her point is that if students learn to paraphrase then they won't plagiarise. Unfortunately paraphrasing another writer's work without citing your source is plagiarism as well (see here, here, or here).

The difficulty is determining what information is common knowledge and not original to any author which won't need a citation. For instance a biography of Lincoln would likely not cite a source for his wife being Mary Todd Lincoln, but would cite a source describing their first meeting.

The Thinking Mom includes a great example of why this kind of citation is so important not just to avoid plagiarism, but also to prove your case:

To make matters worse for me as a student in fourth grade, when I wrote in my report that the tomato was both a fruit and a vegetable the teacher marked it wrong, chastised me in red ink saying that it was NOT a fruit and lowered my grade. 1

While I'm sure that a footnote wouldn't have made a difference for some readers, it's possible that a footnote for this fact might have convinced her teacher to check this point (although I'll be quick to admit I'm not sure a tomato being a fruit is really a fact that needs a source).

I've read academic books where a long list had every single item footnoted not with just one source but many.

I'm not sure I understood this point about footnotes until I began to seriously read academic writing frequently enough to be exposed to meticulous footnotes (and some pretty sad ones too).
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