Respecting Other People's Work

Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else's words, ideas, or creative work and pretending they are your own. Think of it like 'copy-pasting' someone else's brain! In school, this is considered dishonest because it is a form of stealing. When you plagiarize, you aren't showing your teacher what you have learned. Instead, you are hiding behind someone else's hard work. To be a great writer, you must use your own voice and always give credit to the people who helped you learn new facts.

There are two main ways to use information from a book or website. First, there is quoting. This is when you use the exact same words as the author. You must put these words inside quotation marks " ". Second, there is paraphrasing. This is when you take the author's idea but rewrite it entirely in your own words. Even when you paraphrase, you still need to mention the original author! Paraphrasing is like a translation; you keep the meaning but change the 'clothing' of the sentence.

Quotation marks are like 'safety goggles' for words—they protect the original author's work. You should use them whenever you copy $3$ or more words in a row from a source. If you are just stating a general fact that everyone knows (like 'The sky is blue'), you don't need them. But if an author has a unique way of describing something, like calling the sky a 'shimmering ocean of air,' you must use quotes. This shows your reader exactly where your voice ends and the expert's voice begins.