Plagiarism: spotting its many forms

Unintentional forms (or the forms of ignorance, forgetfulness, and/or sloth):

	Failure to provide a citation in conjunction with a quotation
	Failure to provide a citation in conjunction with a legitimately paraphrased passage
	Failure to use quotation marks around a cited passage that is clearly not the writer’s own language
	The Synonym Exchange paraphrase
	Providing inaccurate or incomplete documentation in either the citations or Works Cited page

Source:

Henderson the Rain King is the thousandth retelling of Don Quixote: the dissatisfied idealist, the bourgeois longing to fulfill his life, to transform himself and the world into something more noble. The hero’s dream of glory meets with reality and the hero is transformed or defeated. (Clayton 166)

Clayton suggests that Bellow’s “Henderson the Rain King is the thousandth retelling of Don Quixote….” [The quotation is missing a required citation.]

According to John Jacob Clayton, Bellow’s Henderson is another Don Quixote figure whose dreams must be tempered by reality. [The paraphrase is missed a required citation.]

Henderson the Rain King is the thousandth retelling of Don Quixote (Clayton 166). [Clayton’s exact words are used; however no quotation marks are used indicating that this is his language.]

Bellow’s novel is the hundredth version of Don Quixote (Clayton 166). [One word has merely been substituted for another.]

Bellow’s Henderson is another Don Quixote figure whose dreams must be tempered by reality (Clayton 95). [Citation is provided, but the page number is incorrect.]

Intentional paper-length forms:

	Over-reliance upon one article/book source as the structural device for a paper [Spotting this is relatively easy; the writer uses quotation after quotation after paraphrase, citing the same source over and over.]
	The Patchwork Quilt paper—quotation after quotation, appropriately documented, without any evidence of the writer’s own thought or participation [This, too, is relatively easy to spot, since nearly every sentence will require a citation, and there is little sense of the writer’s own “voice” in the paper.]

Malicious forms:

Use of language from “expert” sources without citation or quotation

Here’s an example:

Henderson and the narrator of the Invisible Man are in the search of their life meanings. Henderson went to Africa and visited with different tribes trying to make things right for them while trying to make life right for him self as well. Told in the form of a first-person narrative, Invisible Man traces the nameless narrator’s physical and psychological journey from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness through a series of flashbacks in the forms of dreams and memories.

[Notice the shift in language from the second to the third sentences. Notice even the shift in typography from underlining to italicizing the title of Invisible Man. Using Google on a phrase from the last sentence will result in the site for the Cliff’s Notes commentary on the novel.]

Use of language, structure, or sources from “amateur” sources (other students)