Academic Integrity: Don't Kidnap or Plunder any work, y'all.

In class tomorrow, we will be starting with a discussion of the "Avoiding Plagiarism" chapter in AWH.
Lecture topics:
1) What's the point of citations? Why do we need them anyway?

2) How does one cite? In-text citations vs. footnotes.

3) Everything Comes in Threes: The three rules for avoiding plagiarism.

4) How can we determine if something NEEDS a citation? What falls under "common knowledge?"

We will NOT as a class be discussing the "Causes of Plagiarism" section. I don't care why you might be tempted to plagiarize. The bottom line is DON'T do it.

We will then look over in-class the MLA citation guide in the AWH (Chapter 14) and doing a few practice citations together. After finishing some sample citations, we will break into groups of three (I will determine the groups) to do what I call the "Citations Scavenger Hunt." This will be a competition between the groups, with a prize awaiting the champion team.

Each team will receive a copy of an electronic document. This document is a sample student paper...and this poor student just doesn't have a clue about how to cite her sources. She's tried to use quotes and paraphrase, but she's done it all wrong--and right now, her paper is a whole mess of plagiarism. As a group, you will have the following tasks:
1) You will need to fix the formatting of the in-text citations and uses of quotes in her paper. This means you will have to make sure that things such as block formatting, ellipses and brackets are used appropriately, in addition to making sure the parenthetical citation is correct.
2) You will need to develop a works cited page for the document. Using the AWH as a guide, you'll need to make sure that all entries contain the proper information, and are in the proper format.
3) BUT to form this works cited page, you'll have to locate the materials...you'll have to determine which quote came from which original source. There will be several to choose from, and you'll have to look at clues in the student's paper and perhaps even use some google-fu to match the quotes to their original sources.

Once you've completed all of these tasks, you'll send the document to me. I'll check it over, and either accept it, or reject it due to errors. The first team to submit a perfect document wins.

This project will likely take up plenty of class time, so I do not plan on discussing the reading from TSIS in class tomorrow. If you have any questions about that reading assignment, please ask them at the start of class.


See you all tomorrow!