Plagiarism Policy: Intellectual Boundaries

Introduction | Plagiarism Defined | Subtleties | Intellectual Boundaries
Public and Private Property | Hearing Your Voice | Traditions of Rhetoric | Think About Alternatives

Understanding plagiarism means understanding the boundaries between your ideas and the ideas of others, knowing where your ideas end and theirs start. In fact, the word "plagiarism" comes from the Latin word plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper." When you plagiarize, you're taking someone, not just their ideas. To avoid plagiarism, you need to maintain that boundary between yourself, your ideas, and the many others you'll encounter in class and your readings.

That's precisely the difference between cases 4 and 2 above: in one instance, a student's peers are helping her correct the words already in her paper. These are her ideas and the peers are only making sure she expresses them more clearly. But as soon as a friend starts changing paragraphs or even a sentence, the ideas are changing as well. They no longer belong to the student, but to the friend. The boundary has been crossed.

But that's not always an easy boundary to find, because often so much of the work we do in the classroom is collaborative. So we also need to understand the difference between public and private intellectual property.

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