On Plagiarism

I delivered my MLA lecture this morning. It turned out unexpectedly hilarious.

The whole point of documenting your sources, using MLA or APA or some other documentation style, is to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is, of course, passing off someone else’s words or ideas as your own.

You see, there are two kinds of plagiarism. There’s doing it on purpose to make yourself sound smarter, to cut corners, to avoid working, etc. And then there’s doing it because you don’t know how to cite sources properly. Which is what I told my students.

Only I expressed it like this:

“There’s no getting around it: you have to know MLA style. It doesn’t matter if you plagiarize because you’re trying to get away with something or because you’re too dumb to know better. It’s still an academic crime and I’m still going to report you.”

That’s a quality education my students are getting, folks.