Sometimes you read something that is written so perfectly that you just cannot imagine it written any other way. Often the style of the quote is necessary to keep the proper tone of the paper. Whatever your reason, it is easy to copy and paste from the Internet to a word processor. Your responsibility is to use that freedom wisely. A report that consists of nothing but quotes is not your report.
How do you avoid plagiarism?Plagiarism is misrepresenting someone else's words or ideas as if they were your own. Plagiarism is not fair to the person who wrote those words in the first place. It is also illegal. To avoid plagiarizing give credit whenever you use an important phrase OR string of six words or more from another person's writing.
The two most common formats for documenting sources are the MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) styles. Online and print sources detail the use of these formats, but at a minimum, each format supplies the author, title, and date of the quoted material. The end of a paper contains full documentation information so that a reader can locate the original source of the quotation. See example 2.
When the material is quoted in the middle of your paragraph, use quotation marks and cite the author in parenthesis. See example 1.
1. back to Washington to give his famous speech "I have a dream." (Martin Luther King Jr., 1963)
2. A complete citation should be located at the end of your report or presentation for each quote.
King, M.L. Jr. (2003, Feb. 28). I have a dream. Speech. Retrieved June 11, 2003,
from http://thekingcenter.com/mlk/chronology.html.
What are the copyright rules for using text?
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10% or 1000 words (whichever is less) text
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No more than 3 poems by 1 poet or 5 poets from 1 anthology, up to 250 words from a poem