STUDENT ZONE (BenOrtiz.com/classes)

PLAGIARISM & MLA FORMAT

Avoiding Plagiarism
In the Western tradition of scholarship, writers clearly acknowledge the use of sources as a way to bring integrity, authority, and proof to bear on academic work. As students and scholars, we consider intentional plagiarism to be outright theft, an act that destroys integrity and yields at least a failure for the course (if not expulsion from the learning community). Unintentional plagiarism – using someone else’s words/work without clear acknowledgment – consists essentially of uninformed, sloppy, and/or lazy scholarship. But careful use of sources can avoid plagiarism.

First, always take careful notes and keep complete details on any piece of research. Second, use word-for-word quotes sparingly, only when the wording is especially strong, memorable, or crucial to your argument. Paraphrase pieces from a source when the wording is not particularly strong but details are relevant. And summarize lengthy passages (or an entire work) to get at a main idea you’d like to include in your paper.

MLA In-Text Citation
Whether quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing, you are using someone else’s work, and so it is always necessary to cite the source. Depending on what kind of source you have and what you’re doing with it, the key is to make the source clear to the reader, so that they will know you are referring to another’s work and so they can find it on your Works Cited Page.

When quoting an author, be sure to use punctuation marks. To direct the reader to the author, you can either name the author within your prose or put the name in a parenthetical cite. Either way, be sure to put the page number in parentheses, like this:

● George Orwell describes his neighborhood “to convey something of the spirit of the Rue du Coq d’Or” (5).
● Some critics have referred to terrorists as “super-empowered angry men” (Friedman 167).

Follow these same guidelines when you summarize, paraphrase, or even just refer to someone else’s ideas, words, research, work, etc. NOTE: If you quote a section that takes up longer than four lines of typewritten text, be sure to use a block quote, e.g.:

In Orwell’s universe, poverty seems to affect the poor in the same way that wealth affects the rich:

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work. (7)

See your handbooks or the Diana Hacker web site for exceptions (author/page unknown, etc.).

The Works Cited Page
Since the Works Cited page is organized per alpha order, with the author’s last name first, you see how crucial it is to make clear in-text citations for your reader to find a source on the WC page.

To build a WC page, first consult an MLA guide to find out how to format any given piece of research. You can then put these cites in alpha-order per the first significant term of the cite – sometimes there will not be an author, and so the first term of a cite might not be a last name but a corporate author or even the title of the work. See the New World Reader or the Diana Hacker web site for exhaustive lists of citation formats.