Basically, plagiarism is the use of another person's WORDS or IDEAS without proper attribution (i.e., indicating where it came from).
You can still summarize or quote another person's work without plagiarizing by making it clear what content is your own, what came from another source, and providing sufficient information about those outside sources.
Easy right?
While the basics of avoiding plagiarism are straightforward, in practice, you will quickly come across gray areas and different disciplines can vary in how they deal with using other peoples' ideas.
We hope that the information on these pages will help to clarify some of the areas of plagiarism that are less cut and dry and work out some of the misunderstandings about what counts as plagiarism.
