Plagiarism Guide

Plagiarism Defined

In an online workshop offered by the University of Maryland's University College on "Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism in the Digital Environment," Professor Rebecca Moore Howard gave a succinct but inclusive definition.

"Most college plagiarism policies gather four very different textual activities
together under the heading of 'plagiarism,' and few specify differential responses
to these different textual activities.

• Fraud: submitting a paper written by someone else
• Patchwriting: using words and phrases from a source text (that may or may not be acknowledged), and patching them together into new sentences
• Failure to cite: not acknowledging the sources of words or information
• Failure to quote: not providing quotation marks for direct quotation"