As educators, your lives are largely about creating foundations, instilling your students with a love of knowledge that will nurture them throughout their entire lives. It is a lofty task you are taking on, and there are not adequate words to express the importance of it. At SourceAid, we believe that integrity, both academic and otherwise, is a necessary foundational component; its merit should be instilled in children and cultivated in people of all ages. We hope that our software and publications are helpful to you; we are in a constant state of rethinking and reworking our products so that they will be of optimal use to you and your students.

SourceAid recentley participated in the New England Library Association Annual Conference in Burlington, Vermont, and National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. We always look forward to meeting you and hearing your suggestions and comments about our products. We want to thank you for the important work you do, and for letting us be part of it.

Plagiarism in Your Classroom
"Why Your Students Need to Know all about Plagiarism"
By Julia Johns, SVP of Development

No one wants a plagiarist in their classroom. When it becomes difficult to differentiate your students' ideas from the ideas they get from books and Web sites, you know it is time to teach them about plagiarism. This article contains reasons why your students need to understand plagiarism well, a quiz to help teach them about plagiarism topics, and information about other ways to plagiarism proof your classroom.

It is important for your students to understand plagiarism fully so that they can:

• recognize when to cite a source
• cite properly
• avoid the penalties of improper citation (e.g. lost points, suspension, failing, etc.)
• select the appropriate writing style to use in any field they research to ensure acceptance continue to create credible work when they leave academia

Help Your Students Learn about Plagiarism Now

Start teaching your students' about plagiarism right away! Give them the brief quiz below and discuss the answers as a class to spur discussion about plagiarism, writing styles, and proper citation.

Plagiarism Quiz

Use this quiz to test your understanding of plagiarism and writing style concepts, or simply as an exercise to refresh your memory.

1. MLA, APA, CMS, and CSE are examples of:
1. Acronyms
2. English book publishers
3. Initials
4. Writing styles
2. Which of the following statements is true?
1. MLA requires you to single space works-cited lists.
2. You only have to cite a source in your paper if you have not cited the source in your works-cited list.
3. You need to know a Web site's URL, or Web address, to include it as a source in your MLA works-cited list.
4. MLA stands for Multiple Language Association.
3. You have committed plagiarism if you:
1. include a complete list of sources, but provide incomplete in-text citations
2. paraphrase an author's ideas without crediting him or her
3. borrow information or ideas from a source, but don't include it in your citation list
4. because you forgot which source contains the idea
5. make up your own format to cite sources
4. After reading your essay that is due in English class tomorrow, your friend shares his or her insights about the essay's subject with you. If you agree with your friend's insights, do you still have to cite your friend in your essay if you add his or her ideas to the paper?
1. No, because there is no way for the English teacher to check to see that the insight originated in my brain or another person's.
2. No, because I agree with the insights. I might have had the insights myself if my friend had not given them to me first.
3. Yes, because I am plagiarizing if I present another person's ideas as my own.
4. No, because I am not sure how to cite a friend in my paper.
5. The following citation which writing style's format to cite a book?

Vasta, R. (1992). Six theories of child development: Revised formulations and issues. (Vol. 1, pp. 54-72). London: Jessica Kinglsey Publishers.

1. Modern Language Association
2. American Psychological Association
3. Chicago Manual of Style
4. Council of Science Editors
6. Which of the following is plagiarism least likely to cause?
1. Lost credibility as a writer and scholar
2. Lost points on a graded paper
3. Possibility to be sued
4. A better grade
7. There is no difference between a works-cited list, reference list, and a bibliography.
1. True
2. False
8. There are benefits to setting up a paper and citations according to writing style rules.
1. True
2. False
9. Boilerplate is a term referring to a situation where it is okay to use someone else's writing without crediting him or her if __________.
1. the writing you are borrowing belongs to the same company that will also own your writing
2. you are in a crisis that prevents you from creating an accurate citation at the time you are writing, so you will be allowed to go back and add the citation later
3. it is for an academic paper
4. the person being quoted is long deceased
10. If you do not know the publication date of your source, the correct way to proceed when citing that source in the MLA style is to:
1. omit the publication date from the citation.
2. look at the dates in the source's citations to estimate an approximate publication date, then put the word ‘circa' before your estimation.
3. add the phrase "no publication date available" after the citation.
4. put the abbreviation "n.d." where the publication date would otherwise go.

Answers:

1. (d) MLA, APA, CMS, and CSE are examples of writing styles.
2. (c) You need to know a Web site's URL, or Web address, to include it as a source in your MLA works-cited list.
3. (a), (b), (c), & (d) You have committed plagiarism if you have done each of the actions in answers a through d. They all are examples of plagiarism.
4. (c) Presenting another person's ideas as your own is always plagiarism. This is the case even if:
• you borrow ideas from your closest friend
• you think you could have thought of the ideas you borrowed on your own (if you only had more time or energy)
5. The correct answer is (b), APA. Here are some distinguishing clues to knowing that this citation follows APA guidelines:
• The author's first initial replaces the author's full first name
• The date appears immediately after the author's name
• The book title suggests that the paper may be social science oriented and APA is usually used for social science papers.
6. (d) Plagiarism is least likely to improve your grade, whether that grade is a letter from a teacher or a general rating from an audience. Some writers mistakenly think that plagiarizing can improve their grade because the chances of getting caught seem low. There are, however, a variety of ways that a reader can identify plagiarism in your writing.

The reader is especially likely to identify plagiarism in your writing if he or she is already familiar with:

• the content, words, or style you borrow from someone else
• the way you typically express your thoughts
• the complexity of the ideas you usually brainstorm
7. (b) False. While works-cited lists, reference lists, and bibliographies all provide information to help readers locate the same sources you researched, they do have differences. These lists:
• require different citation formats. A citation to a book in a bibliography would appear differently than a citation for the same book on a works-cited list.
• include sources with information about very different subjects.
• A bibliography, which follows CMS style, often contains sources with historical information.
• A references list, which follows CSE or APA, could direct you to sources with scientific or social science information.
• A works-cited list is more likely to direct you to a novel, a poem, or classic literature than to a history or science book.
• have different formatting requirements for spacing, margins, etc.
8. (a) True. By following writing style formatting and citation guidelines.
• each document written about a particular subject has a predictable appearance, regardless of who composed it.
• writers do not have to come up with their own ideas about how to format their papers.
• writers are not accused of copying other writers' paper layouts.
• paper and citation setups follow a logic that is content appropriate. Because of the continuously advancing nature of scientific texts, for example, publication dates in CSE (Council of Science Editors) citations appear closer to the beginning of citations than they do in MLA (Modern Language Association) citations.
9. (a) Boilerplate refers to a situation where it is okay to use someone else's writing without crediting him or her if you are writing on behalf of the same company that owns the text you borrow.
10. (d) If you do not know the publication date of your source, the correct way to proceed when citing that source in the MLA style is to put the abbreviation "n.d." where the publication date would otherwise go.

Similarly, you can use the abbreviation "n.p." in place of unavailable publication information and you can put the abbreviation "n.pag." in place of an unknown page number.

Help Students Learn about Plagiarism all the Time:

When you subscribe to Citation Builder Classroom Edition, you will be giving each of your students the tools to:

• build bibliographies, footnotes, and endnotes simultaneously while also learning their proper structure,
• save citations online,
• download guides to MLA, APA, CMS, and CSE,
• create accurate in-text citations in Microsoft Word as they write,
• and more!

To learn more about the Classroom Edition, please e-mail institution@sourceaid.com or call (877) 687-2324 to speak to a SourceAid representative.

Cite It Right for Your Classroom
By Sarah Keller, English Team Director

Cite It Right, with its compilation of simplified citation formats in the four major writing styles, is an invaluable addition to any student library…but what can the book do for teachers and professors? In addition to being a comprehensive and straightforward citation manual, Cite It Right also includes several chapters detailing every stage in the paper-writing process, from organizing ideas to crafting strong thesis statements to proofreading techniques. With clear directions and detailed examples, it easily lends itself to textbook capabilities. If you are serious about your students avoiding plagiarism, and want to better their paper-writing skills while walking them through the citation process step by step, introduce Cite It Right into your classroom.

Cite It Right Classroom Set
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