Three Most Common Forms of Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of passing someone else's work off as your own.

Plagiarism is taking someone's written work and passing it off as your own, whether it be in school, at work or on the internet. Some types of plagiarism are completely unintentional, while other types are deliberate copying of someone else's work.

Direct Plagarism

This is taking the exact words from someone else's writing and passing it off as your own. Thanks to the copy and pasting ability of computer's now, this is the easiest way to quickly finish a project if you are on a deadline--just copy and paste someone else's work you found into your own project and say it is yours. Another way to do this is to type a passage directly out of a book and say it is yours.

Paraphrase Plagiarism

This is the most common type of unintentional plagiarism. Students believe that just because they switch the words around while leaving the context and meaning the same, it isn't actually plagiarizing. In order for it not to be plagiarizing, students need to put everything into their own words.

Patchwork Plagiarism

This is another type of unintentional plagiarism. This is when a writer takes several different phrases and passages from several different authors and pieces and patches them together to call it their own.

Fabricating Citations

If you make up a source you are citing in a paper, that is plagiarism. It is also plagiarism if you cite the wrong source, or cite a source just because you need a certain amount of sources and you are short a source or two.

References

• Central Oregon Community College: Types of Plagiarism
• UC San Diego: Types of Plagiarism