Clarity Strategic^TM

Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else's creative work (e.g. written, spoken, or artistic) and representing it as your own. This is a form of theft – and in some careers, especially those in which creative works are a product, it'll get the perps into criminal or civil legal troubles.

What you may not realize is that plagiarism does you no favors. If you plagiarize someone else's works, you

• lose a chance to take original material and extend it with your own – to stand on the shoulders of giants
• lose the sense of accomplishment you get from your own works
• set yourself up for later humiliation if someone sees you as "expert" and later finds out you are not

I'm no expert, but I have caught plagiarism by students in the past, and I know some people who ARE experts. I have seen students suspended from school, and given failing grades, for this. You may yourself have seen a college professor or scientist fired for it.

In social media, plagiarism is rampant. Here are some warning signs:

• quotes with no attribution at all
• poorly paraphrased quotes, very similar to someone else's original work, but attributed to the person posting them
• quotes with words pulled or "text message coded" (like "ur" instead of "you are") to save space
• quotes attributed only to "anonymous" or (in some cases) to someone other than the original author

We won't always catch these offenses, because there's only so much room, and we may think the material is more important than who wrote it, or because our writing of a tweet or Facebook status isn't exactly scholarship. But even on tweets, it is possible to catch something of a writer's style, and identify a quote written in a different style. What that means is, if you plagiarize, even on a tweet, you can be caught.

Here are two tried-and-true methods to avoid even the appearance of plagiarism:

(1) Paraphrasing: the act of taking source material and stating it in your own words. This means "completely in your own words." This often works well because you can add something to the original material while you're becoming familiar with it.

Practice on this: what does the following paragraph really say? (It's a familiar phrase. This interpretation appeared in Reader's Digest in the early 1980s.)

We respectfully petition, request, and entreat that due and adequate provision be made, this day and the date hereinafter subscribed, for the satisfying of these petitioners’ nutritional requirements and for the organizing of such methods of allocation and distribution as may be deemed necessary and proper to assure the reception by and for said petitioners of such quantities of baked cereal products as shall, in the judgment of the aforesaid petitioners, constitute a sufficient supply thereof.

(2) Citing Sources: the act of saying accurately where your material comes from. This will work well because by citing an authority, we show ourselves as having some relationship to that authority. We can become an authority ourselves, showing that we understand and appreciate what it took for the author of the original work to become an authority.

A fully-cited source, in a full-length work, would include

• Title of article or book
• Author(s)/editor(s)
• Publication (if article); Forum (if posting to a newsgroup or message board)
• Publisher (or sponsoring company/organization)
• Publication date (or date last updated for an Internet-based source; if that's not available, offer the date of your access to the source)

Of course, you've gone well over 140 characters if you do this. So for a tweet or status update, at least make sure you get the author right. And keep a record of a full citation someplace, just in case you have to use the quote again. If it's a good one, you probably will.

Sources

The Online Writing Lab at Purdue: Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing, http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/563/02/