Paraphrasing

Provide your students with suggestions for effective paraphrasing:

• Set aside the original text, and try to rewrite the main ideas in your own words.
•Use quotation marks within a paraphrase when you want to use an author’s exact words.
•Move past the desire to simply substitute words with synonyms or rearrange the author’s sentences or
paragraphs. To be a paraphrase, the new text must be in your own language.
•Always check your version with the original. Make sure you are not distorting the author’s intended meaning
(adapted from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/619/01/).

Submitting One’s Own Work

•Go over Academic Integrity early with the class.
•Highlight the academic consequences for turning in previously written papers.
•Make the pledge (in 103 ,students are required to write their own academic integrity pledges) an earlier assignment.
Right now it's about a month into the syllabus.
•Particularly in the second semester, make sure students are aware that work must be new.

Public Domain
Let students know that copyright has expired if the work was published before 1923. Also, teach them about the four
common ways that works arrive in the public domain:
•Expiration of copyright
•Failure to renew copyright
•Owner deliberately places it in the public domain
•No copyright protection available on that particular type of work (Fishman, Attorney Stephen. The Public Domain:
How to Find and Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art, and More. 3rd ed. Ed. Richard Stim. Valencia, CA: Delta
Printing Solutions, Inc., 2006.)

Idea Theft
The word “plagiarize” comes from the Latin word “plagiarius” for kidnapper. Teach students that it is a
plagiarism/idea theft to:
•build on someone else's idea or phrase to write a paper without giving the original author credit;
•copy sentences, phrases, paragraphs, or ideas from someone else's work, published or unpublished, without giving
the original author credit (adapted from http://infotutor.sdsu.edu/plagiarism/).

Also, let students know they can avoid plagiarism when using someone else’s ideas by:
•noting the name of the idea's originator in the sentence or throughout a paragraph about the idea;
•using parenthetical citations, footnotes, or endnotes to refer readers to additional sources about the idea, as
necessary;
•being sure to use quotation marks around key phrases or words that the idea's originator used to describe the idea
(adapted from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/03/).

Cultural Differences
•Explain clearly what plagiarism is and that many international students are often confronted with this problem.
•Make sure students know how to quote, cite, and paraphrase.
•Explain to the students that the emphasis is more on the process of critical thinking and expressing their own ideas.
•Encourage students to keep reading logs to summarize authors’ key arguments, write about their own ideas, and
make connections with other sources (adapted from http://www.mwp.hawaii.edu/resources/wm6.html).

Common Knowledge
•Teach students to cite information when they are unsure if it constitutes “common knowledge.” Since we live and
work in a technologically advanced environment, we should never assume that facts are "common .”
•Make sure students know to give reference to the individual (s)or the class where ideas are started.
•Let them know that generally something is common knowledge if it’s undocumented in at least five credible sources.
•Teach students to consider if their audience will already know the information—if so, it may be common knowledge
amongst the field (adapted from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/02/).
English 885 Dr. Cynthia Haynes 10 March 2009
Briana Devaser, Brett Johnson , Katrina Johnson, Stephen Leech, Janet Miller, Mari Ramler, & Beth Wilkerson