What is Plagiarism? Discuss and Define with student input. Review the information from Purdue University's Online Writing Lab. Plagiarism is easy for middle and high school students to slide into when trying to write a research paper. The Online Writing Lab's section on Research defines plagiarism in terms teens can understand:
Whether intentional or, as is more often the case, inadvertent, the result is that some or all of another author's ideas become represented as your own. It's like lip-synching to someone else's voice and accepting the applause and rewards for yourself.
Activity: Bring in copies of a newspaper article and give one copy to each student to read. Ask students to begin a paragraph with a quote from the article.
Then say:
- Did you place quotation marks around words from the article?
- Did you mention the writer's name and article title or newspaper name?
- Did you follow citation style?
- Did you “set up” your quotation?
Allow a brief time to revise and then ask groups to read around and select the best sentence to share aloud with the class.
Listen to selected group papers and comment on different ways to “set up” quotations. Students do not need to lead into every quote with "stated." Brainstorm some other options. Review these ideas for using quotes creatively from the Writer's Web.
Next, give student's another article and ask them to begin a paragraph with a quotation.
Excellent Resources:
- Beware of Plagiarism! The University of Ottawa has a very clear definition of plagiarism and great examples at the university level.
- Avoiding Plagiarism: A nice activity to check understanding of plagiarism.
Training Activity to Prevent Plagiarism
Return home