Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else’s idea, words, or work and passing them off as one’s own. You may find some amazing resources. An author may say it so well, you don’t want to change a single word. That is great, and there are ways to give someone else credit for their own work. It becomes a problem when you make a decision to use someone else’s exact words without giving them credit. This amounts to stealing and it can cause all kinds of problems for anyone who does it.
While there are some resources you can use as-is without giving credit, such as public domain media, most work pulled from somewhere else requires things like quotation marks and citations. Even if you paraphrase (put it into your own words), you still need to give credit where credit is due.
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Avoiding plagiarism is not hard, but it does take some time to do it right. The steps you need to take to make sure you give the proper credit will depend on the situation. Consider the scenarios below:
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