Avoiding Plagiarism

Paraphrasing: the most important step in not plagiarizing

1) Paraphrase - Paraphrasing is taking information and putting it into your own voice; your own sentences.

How do I paraphrase?

Paraphrasing is very hard. Is is hard to rewrite facts from a source.

One strategy to help you paraphrase is to make a bullet list of facts. When you bullet your facts, you take out the "sentence structure words" and only focus on the important keywords.

For example:

"The goliath birdeater tarantula of South America is arguably the biggest spider in the world." (National Geographic)

I don't want to sound like the original sentence, but I need the important facts:

• • • • goliath birdeater tarantula

      • South America

      • Biggest spider

      • World

When it is time to write my paraphrase, I will try to not follow the same pattern as the original sentence:

Good Paraphrase: The world's largest spider, the goliath birdeater tarantula, can be found it South America.

Bad Paraphrase: The goliath birdeater tarantula in South America is the largest spider in the word."

*** It is not enough to change a few words. Copying sentence structure is plagiarism.

So how do I apply this as a notetaking strategy?

-2 STEP PROCESS: Begin with a bullet list of main keywords or ideas, then paraphrase the information into your own sentences.

-1 STEP PROCESS: Paraphrase from the source directly into your note sheet. Make the bullets in your mind. Don't copy sentence structure. More than 3 words in a row from the original is plagiarism.