IT and the Historian: Week 8: how to avoid Plagiarism.: footnotes and quotations

The first thing you should do is to save this lesson as a Bookmark. Then you can always go back to it easily.

Today's lesson is another simple exercise using Word 97 or lower versions. It is designed to help you to use footnotes and quotations marks to avoid the great sin of Plagiarism. To do this you will need to have some quotations, so, in order to help you appear more erudite than the average student, this lesson will include some on-line sources for historical quotations. These, of course, can be copied from the web page concerned and then pasted into your Word 97 document. Remember that you can jump between applications, so you should aim to jump from the on-line source of quotations to your Word 97 document. To do this lesson, therefore, you should have Netscape 3.0 and Word 97 open at the same time. They should therefore be both open, minimised on the taskbar if not in use.
Plagiarism is regarded very seriously by both the department and the University. Those guilty of Plagiarism are subject to severe disciplinary measures. The University definition of Plagiarism is as follows:

  1. Plagiarismis the unacknowledged use of another person's ideas, words or work. At one extreme, Plagiarism is simply a form of cheating, such as where the whole or a significant part of work submitted towards an examination or degree is the unacknowledged work of another, copied slavishly from a book or research paper. At the other extreme, Plagiarism may occur accidentally, through poor standards of scholarship, or may concern insignificant parts of submitted work.
  2. You may be unclear as to what use may be made of the work of others in the field without raising concerns about Plagiarism. If you are in doubt on this matter, you should consult your supervisor. In most cases, the adoption of appropriate standards of scholarship will avoid such concerns. The following general guidelines may assist you:
  1. passages copied verbatim from the work of another must be enclosed in quotation marks. A full reference to the original source must be provided. The substitution of a few words in an otherwise verbatim passage will not obviate the need to use quotation marks and to provide a full reference
  2. you must always give due acknowledgement to the sources of ideas or data which are not yours and are not truly in the public domain (for example, because they are novel or controversial) or are not widely accepted or widely recognised
  3. ideas and data which are your own or are truly in the public domain may be included without attribution, but should be expressed in your own words
  4. you must take care to distinguish between your own ideas or work and those of others. Any ambiguity in such a distinction could give rise to a suspicion of Plagiarism
  5. where your work is the result of collaborative research,you must take care to acknowledge the source of data, analysis or procedures which are not your own.

Plagiarism then must be understood for what it is. It is the unattributed borrowing of other people's words. This can mean wholesale copying of paragraphs or even pages, and attempting to pass them off as your own. The definition also extends to unattributed sentences which you might (even in innocence) have copied from a book or article and inserted into an essay. If the sentence is not footnoted as a quotation, then you will be guilty of Plagiarism. If you base a paragraph or a particular argument in an essay on an author's work, you should also acknowledge this borrowing in a footnote, even if you do not borrow his or her sentences directly.


Students guilty of Plagiarism will be subject to severe disciplinary measures imposed by the History Department and possibly also by the University Registrar.
At the very least, those found guilty might well score zero for ALL written work submitted. Plagiarism found in honours years dissertations will mean that the entire dissertation will be given a FAIL MARK.
Do NOT do it.

Today's exercise, therefore, is designed around your ability (or otherwise) to link quotations in an apparently logical way around some theme or other. The aim of the lesson is to get you to attribute all quotations routinely. The idea of the lesson is that you use Netscape to find historical quotations. Try and search for quotations that appear relevant to People and their History. After copying the quotation directly into your word document enclose it with quotation marks and then simply insert a footnote at the end of your quotation. In the footnote supply the correct source, with page numbers if possible. Remember that in Word 97 it is extremely easy to insert pictures, footnotes, page numbers and symbols using the pull down Insert menu, which should look something like this:


After selecting footnote, you should then get a box inviting you to choose its format, position etc. This box should look something like this:

Today's task is to be handed in.
Create about a page of text, with historical quotations loosely based around a lecture or lectures that you have heard in People and their History. Save your work and print it out at a printer station. Marks will be awarded for word processing competence.
The following are good sources of historical quotations. Simply click on the underlined blue words to go straight to the quotations source. Try and find authors cited as basic reading for the lectures in this semester'sPeople and their History

Bartlett's Quotations On-Line

Search for quotations by author etc.

The Kerrie DeGood Quotes

Quotations Home Page at Lexmark

A Guide for Writing Research Papers based on Modern Language Association(MLA: Statement on plagiarism

Computer program to detect plagiarism

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