Prof. Elspeth Brown
History Department
University of Toronto, Mississauga

When writing history papers, remember that you need to give credit where credit is due. If you have borrowed ideas, sentences, phrases or paragraphs from another source, you MUST give credit to the author in the form of a footnote, using quotation marks for direct quotes. As Alyssa El Lodwick has written on her Brown University web page, "Plagiarism, or the act of using the ideas or words of another person without granting that person recognition, is not only dishonest–because you are, in essence, claiming those words or ideas as your own–it is also an intellectual crime that has been prosecuted in courts of law" (see http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Writing_Center/lodewick.htm).

Here are some guidelines for avoiding plagiarism, drawn from the UT history dept. guidelines. Further elaboration can be found below.

1. You may quote or paraphrase another writer if she has stated an idea strikingly, as evidence to support your arguments or conclusions, or as a point against which to argue. Such borrowing, however, should be used sparingly, and the source must always be indicated in a footnote. The aim of scholarship is to develop your own ideas and research. Only by developing your own thoughts and arguments will you mature academically.

2. All work submitted by students must be their own work. You are not allowed to cooperate in the preparation of papers, take-home tests, or exams in which the questions are distributed beforehand without the explicit permission of the instructor. When such permission is given, students must not prepare common papers or test answers unless the instructor explicitly permits this. If students are to obtain individual marks they must present their own individual efforts for evaluation.

3. When a piece of work has been submitted for credit in one course it may not be submitted for credit in another course, unless written permission of the instructors in both courses has been obtained before the work is submitted.

For guidelines on appropriate documentation of history papers, including footnotes, use Kate Turabian's classic writing guide, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

Alyssa El Lodwick of Brown University has some further pointers that you might find helpful. She has written: "Student writers with whom I work frequently voice the complaint that determining what constitutes plagiarism can be confusing. Most people find it fairly obvious that copying another author’s words into one’s own work without crediting that other author constitutes plagiarism. In addition, you plagiarize even when you do credit the author but use his exact words without so indicating with quotation marks or block quotations. You also plagiarize when you use words so close to those in your source, that if you place your work next to the source, you would see that you could not have written what you did without the source at your elbow. Finally, the act of taking another person’s idea, putting it into one’s own words, and then including it in one’s paper–without acknowledging that the idea came from some other source–is plagiarizing.

"Some students try to avoid plagiarizing by shunning the use of direct quotes. Instead of copying another author’s words exactly, the students attempt to paraphrase–or put into their own words–passages from primary and secondary texts. This is not a bad idea, but

in order for paraphrasing to work, two things must be remembered.

•The act of paraphrasing does not give you permission to copy almost an entire passage, simply changing a few words here or there. If you are only changing an occasional word or phrase, or if you are keeping most of the important phrases from the original text in your own version, you are not paraphrasing, and you would be better off directly quoting the source. A close paraphrase may count as plagiarism, even if you cite the source.

•Even when you do paraphrase correctly, and completely re-word the statement of an idea so that it reflects your own phrasing and not that of the original author, you need to cite the material that you have paraphrased because it contains ideas that originated in the mind of somebody else. You might not be directly quoting another author, but you are still discussing another scholar’s thoughts.

" . . .Be conscious of where your eyes are as you put words on paper or on a screen. If your eyes are on your source at the same moment your fingers are flying across the keyboard, you risk doing something that weeks, even months, even years later could result in your public humiliation. Whenever you use a source extensively, compare your page with the original. If you think someone could run her finger along your sentences and find synonyms or synonymous phrases for words in the original in roughly the same order, try again. You are least likely to plagiarize inadvertently if, as you write, you keep your eyes not on your source but on the screen or on your own page, and you report what your source has to say after those words have been filtered through your own understanding of them."

Due to the serious nature of plagiarism, you may well wonder whether there are ever instances in which you can incorporate ideas or language that did not originate in your own mind into your writing without including citations. I will respond by saying that there is

never justification for not citing–and enclosing in quotation marks–specific language lifted directly from other documents. Technically, scholars are often excused from citing "commonly-known" ideas or facts; however, the question of what constitutes

"commonly-known" is very murky. To be on the safe side, I encourage you to go ahead and use a citation if you have any doubts about whether an idea/fact you want to discuss is "commonly-known." In my mind, it is better to cite too often, and err on the side of

being overly cautious, than to cite too infrequently and risk being brought up on charges of plagiarism. I also strongly advise you to talk to your TA or your professor if you have specific questions about whether or not something needs to be cited."

The above information can be found at: http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Writing_Center/lodewick.htm.

The penalties are severe. And I will do everything possible to make sure that full charges are brought, since (like most educators) I find plagiarism to be the most grave of academic crimes. University sanctions include censure; zero for the offending piece of work; reduction of the final mark; denial of University privileges; expulsion; revocation off degree. You should acquaint yourself with the University's Code of Behaviour on this and related issues: http://www.artsandscience.utoronto.ca/ofr/calendar/rules.htm#behaviour.