Plagiarism

Plagiarism is something I had never thought about before I started college.  In secondary school we are thought how to use direct quotes and ideas from texts in our work, but nobody ever mentioned anything about referencing where this quote came from. 

Essentially this was stealing.  By not mentioning what book we took the information from, you are taking credit for the authors ideas and passing it off as your own.  There are a few different methods of referencing out there.  From my experience the Harvard Referencing Style is the most popular and recognised.  An online tutorial about this can be found here.

A few quick things to remember when citing someone else's work:

• Paraphrasing.  By re-wording what the original author has said, you are using their idea but not stealing it and claiming it as your own.
• If you do decide to include a piece of information directly from another source, ensure you use quotation marks to show this is not your original work.  This is perfectly acceptable-as long as you reference where it came from!