The following examples are student attempts to paraphrase an except from Mark Clayton's "A Whole Lot of Cheatin' Going On." Versions A and B are examples of "accidental plagiarism," and version C is done correctly and is not plagiarism.
Such savvy borrowing may be lost on some educators, but others, like librarians, are catching up. "Students are finding it so easy to use these sources that they will dump them in the middle of the papers without any attribution," says John Ruszkiewicz, and English professor at Texas. "What they don't realize is how readily [professors] can tell the material isn't the student's and how easy it is for instructors to search this material on the Web" (434).
This paraphrase is an example of plagiarism because the student uses many of the same phrases as the original passage and the same overall style and structure as the original author with just a few substitution words or phrases, without using any quotation marks and without citations.
This paraphrase is an example of "accidental" plagiarism because the student has combined a couple sentences, substituted a few words, but still has used the same overall structure with minor substitutions and has given a nod to the original author with a tagline but still does not have a proper parenthetical citation anywhere in the paraphrase.
This student has paraphrased using his or her own words and sentence constructions, and the student has accurately reflected the author's ideas and cited him correctly both with a tag and a parenthetical citation.
Content in this "Examples of attempted paraphrasing" section is reused with permission from:
Sims, Marcie. The Write Stuff: Thinking Through Essays. Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2009. Print.