what is plagiarism anyway you've probably heard a lot about plagiarism as a student so what is it according to Webster's definition to plagiarize is to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one's own to use another production without crediting the source sounds pretty serious when we say that plagiarizing is stealing as if it's criminal but plagiarism can carry some serious consequences in school each school has its own plagiarism policy or academic honesty policy but students who plagiarize may get reported to school officials get an F on the assignment or in the course and in some cases even expelled from the school given these consequences let's take a look at some sample papers to see what plagiarism really is and how it looks in student writing we've tagged 10 types of plagiarism to look at more closely this paper is the Clone and represents a highly problematic form of plagiarism it is a word for word copy of text from the original with no quotation marks and no citations this is clearly plagiarism in the control C paper the student has attempted to disguise the direct copy and paste by adding in a few original words this too represents a highly problematic form of plagiarism the student has deliberately attempted to use the material and then throw off the instructor with a few words here and there the find and replace looks like the control C but in this case the student intent becomes a question did this student intentionally change the words and phrases or does a student simply not know how to paraphrase a text or put it into his or her own words regardless of student intent it still is plagiarism the remix has some further problems with paraphrasing but this time from various sources often this is what students think of when they think of research pulling sources together into a new hole but research is quite different and requires good paraphrasing skills the recy is a type of plagiarism that many students don't even recognize as a problem students typically cannot and should not reuse large portions of a text from another paper they have written that means students can't recycle papers from class to class school policies about this differ so you need to check what your school policy is one way to avoid this is as a writer you can cite your original writing even if it is unpublished the hybrid represents a student who has made the paper look like an ethically and accurately written paper but the student cuts and pastes material from other sources as well this typically represents intentional plagiarism like the remix the mashup is nothing but a constant stream of outside material with little to know original writing to link the outside sources together this also represents what a lot of students think of when they think of research and it's just not the case the 404 ER is an example of plagiarism that tries to to throw the instructor off by citing sources inaccurately usually students attempt this when they don't know how to site sources you can't be apathetic here citing sources takes time and attention to the details the aggregator has sources cited but the original writing is not balanced with the sources in this case the student has allowed the research to drive the paper's development rather than use the research to support his or her own writing the last type of plagiarism is the retweet in this case the student knows that he or she needs to cite sources and attempts to paraphrase but the paraphrase relies too heavily on the original text paraphrasing is a skill that takes practice you can see key ways to avoid plagiarism after reviewing these 10 types understand how to paraphrase a text how to document or cite a source and how to research so the paper contains original content