There are two ways you can plagiarize: deliberately or accidentally.

• Deliberate (intentional) plagiarism is knowingly taking work that is not your own, and submitting it as though you had done that work. This could be intentionally copying another person's work, such as copying and pasting from a website. It could also be purchasing a paper online.
• Accidental plagiarism is far more common. You may forget to cite something, forget where you found certain information, not realize something needed to be cited, or forget to put someone else's exact words in quotation marks.

Fortunately, accidental plagiarism is easy to avoid. All you need to do is give credit to the original creators of whatever information you are using. This means:

• putting exact words in quotation marks
• using proper citations for words, thoughts, and ideas that are not your own

How you will do this depends on the citation style you are using in your class. Some common ones are MLA and APA. For information on how to cite, check out our other Guides here:

Here are a couple of tricks and tips to help you avoid accidentally plagiarizing in your work:

• Take detailed notes!
  • If you come across any information that you think you might want to use later, make a note of the information as well as the source you found it in. Include the author, title, and page number (if you have one). This will make it easier to keep track of where you found your information. When you go to write your paper later you can refer to these notes to help format your citations.
• Read only one source at a time
  • It can become difficult to keep track of things if you go from source to source too quickly. Read one source, make sure you have taken your detailed notes, and then move on to the next.
• Keep track of your sources
  • Use a word document, or a sheet of paper, to keep track of all of the sources you are using. If it is a large project, consider using Noodlebib to help. Noodlebib can help you create citations and references lists as well.

All images used in this Guide are from Pixabay, and may be used without attribution per the Pixabay license.