(Content for this page comes from the MLA Handbook cited in the footnote at the bottom of the page. Author of page has excerpted and adapted the information for educational purposes only.)
Plagiarism Defined and Citations Explained.
Plagiarism is the use of another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source. Plagiarism is to give the impression that you have written or thought something that you have in fact borrowed from someone else, and to do so is considered a violation of the professional obligation to acknowledge academic debts.
The most blatant form of plagiarism is to reproducing someone else’s sentences, more or less verbatim, and presenting them as your own. Other forms include repeating another’s particular apt phrase without appropriate acknowledgment, paraphrasing someone else’s argument as your own, introducing another’s line of thinking as your own development, and failing to cite the source for a borrowed thesis or approach.
In scholarly writing, everything derived from an outside source requires documentation-not only direct quotations and paraphrases but also information and ideas. Of course, good judgment as well as ethics should guide you in interpreting this rule. Although you rarely need, for example, to give sources for familiar proverbs (“You can’t judge a book by its cover”), well-known quotations (“We shall overcome”), or common knowledge (“George Washington was the first president of the United States”), you must indicate the origin of any appropriated material that readers may otherwise mistake for your own.
There are two types of citations:
1)The most practical way to supply this information is to insert brief parenthetical acknowledgments in the manuscript wherever you incorporate another’s words, facts or ideas. Usually, the author’s last name and page reference is all you need.
(Ex.) Ancient writers attributed the invention of the monochord to Pythogoras in the sixth century BC (Marcuse 197).
2)Footnote styles are preferred in historical essays and books.
See the bottom of the page to see how I footnoted information presented in the essay.
3) Cite internet sources: (Author, project or page title)
You must first write author and then project title for citations within the essay (Abilock, Research Advice).
In Bibliography you cite a webpage in the following order:
Author (Last name, first name), Title of web page, Part of a group of documents entitled, date created or last revised, sponsoring or associated institution, date you saw it, address.
The citation allows the reader to find the complete text name and information in the alphabetically arranged bibliography.
Bibliography
Abilock, Debbie. “Research Advice for a Complex Topic.” Nueva Library Help. 9 Sept. 1997. Nueva School. 1 November 2001. <http://nuevaschool.org/~debbie/library/research/advice.html.>
Achtert, Walter S. and Joseph Gibaldi. The MLA Style Manual. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1985.
Marcuse, Sibyl. A Survey of Musical Instruments. New York: Harper 1975.Spear, Karen. “Building
Cognitive Skills in Basic Writers.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 9 (1983): 91-98.
Example of how to write Footnotes:
1Walter Achtert and Joseph Gibaldi, The MLA Style Manual. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1985) 4-5.
2Achtert 163.