The text you find, use, and forget to cite. #AvoidPlagiarism!

Plagiarism is the theft of other's ideas and using the ideas as your own. Plagiarism was not a problem in classical times, but with the invention of printing technology and copyright law, it is easy to take people's work and claim them as your own for quick use. There are two ways that you can avoid unintentional plagiarism. Keep in mind that you are contributing to a conversation with other writers and develop effective ways of note taking while reading through your sources. It is easy to assimilate all the material we have read and then think that the ideas are our own once we have shuffled around some words here and there and constructed a new sentence. This however, is what plagiarism is all about. Even though the thoughts may be jumbled around, the same ideas are still being presented and the author that came up with the ideas needs to be credited. That is what works cited pages are for. Books, newspapers, pictures, music, magazines, and many more places where we get information all have authors and need to be cited properly when used. In-text citations are also necessary in papers when you are quoting your source or using the information directly from the cite. These are easy and are not time consuming. Let's say you get information from a magazine. You would just need to put the author's last name and the page number you found the information on in parenthesis. Citing your sources is easy, but people easily forget to credit the authors that they get their information from. Stay away from plagiarism and cite your sources!