Ideas Words Person's Essay Plagiarism Cheating Test People

In the United States, people are taught that they should not "plagiarize." "Plagiarism" happens when someone copies another person's writing or ideas and uses them as if they were his or her own.

People often want to use another person's ideas or words in your own writing. In the U.S., this is okay if you "attribute" those ideas or words to the original author, meaning that you make it clear whom the ideas and words belong to. If you take another person's ideas and put them in your essay without showing where those ideas came from, your essay has "unattributed ideas," or plagiarism. But if you attribute those ideas to the original writer, perhaps by saying, "As Mr. Jackson wrote in his book....," then it isn't considered plagiarism.

When you want to use someone else's exact words in your essay, you must place those words in quotation marks (" ") with information about the person who first wrote those words. For example, you could write, "According to Marie Sanclair, 'Learning a second language is one of life's most rewarding experiences.'" Because your essay names Marie Sanclair, this isn't plagiarism. But if you use her words without quotation marks, it is plagiarism because the words appear to be your own when they aren't.

In American schools and universities, students who plagiarize are "punished" and receive bad or failing grades for their work. Teachers and professors take plagiarism very seriously and consider it a major act of dishonesty. Students must be very careful to attribute other people's work when they use it in their own writing.