One reason students fall into the trap of plagiarizing is that they "lift" passages from their sources rather than figure out what the passages mean. Most students can readily identify what is important in a passage even if they don't fully understand its meaning. Copying the material, either by plagiarizing or by quoting becomes a shortcut to getting the paper done. Unfortunately, the end result is frequently a failing grade and possibly, if the paper is plagiarized, a charge of student misconduct.
If a student has written a paper which makes sense, but the student is unable to explain it, it is almost certain that the student has inappropriately used sources to write the paper.
The following sentence contains a fairly simple idea, although the idea may not be obvious at first. The quote is taken from a book by William Zinsser titled On Writing Well:
"But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components" (Zinsser 7)
The sentence is clearly marked as a quotation by quotation marks at the beginning and end of the quotation, and, as a quotation, is copied word for word from the original. The writer has also included a tag (internal citation) that identifies the source by author and the page where the quote can be located.
While a writer could incorporate this idea as a quotation, the quotation is not particularly interesting, nor can a writer have a paper that is primarily a string of quotations. The following is a student's attempt to paraphrase the idea contained in the original quotation:
The trick to the best writing is to prune each sentence to its bare parts (Zinsser 7).
While this might look like a good paraphrase, it is not, and is actually an example of plagiarism. The student has confused paraphrasing with a simple substitution of words. The new sentence is just the old sentence written with a thesaurus in hand.
In order to correctly paraphrase Zinsser's idea, it is necessary to understand the idea. If writers are "strip[ping] every sentence to its cleanest component," what exactly are writers doing? The key idea seems to be that good writers remove unnecessary words.
Sample notecard
Good writing--remove unnecessary words
(Zinsser 7)
Later, when incorporating those notes into the paper, it would be impossible for the writer to "capture" the wording or flavor of Zinsser's original statement (unless the writer just had a phenomenal memory). The writer would probably put something like the following into his or her paper
Good writers remove unnecesary words from their papers (Zinsser 7).
[Note that, although Zinsser has not been quoted, he has still given credit for the idea contained in the paraphrase.]
- Read the material slowly and carefully,
- Write down key nouns,
- Stop and think about the material,
- Re-state the key idea simply using the key nouns as aids,
- Write down the restatement without looking back at the original.
- If an idea is too complex, work sentence by sentence from the original.
- Include the appropriate internal citations.
- If characteristic phrases are used, surround them with quotation marks.
In the quotation from Zinsser, two phrases seem particularly characteristic of his writing style: "strip," and "cleanest components." Of these, only "strip" is worth quoting. The phrase "cleanest components" is not striking, nor is it as clear as 'unnecessary words.' If the word "strip" or the phrase "cleanest components" from the Zinsser quotation above were used in a paper, the paper would "feel" plagiarized. Recent news stories about professional writers who plagiarized were guilty of just this use of characteristic phrases. If a writer chooses to include these characteristic phrases in his or her notes, the writer must surround them by quotation marks, both in the notes and on the final draft of the paper.
Good writers "strip" unneeded words from their writing (Zinsser 7).