Sarah Gassen: Plagiarism and how to not do it

That’s on top of two submissions to the Star’s Sunday “Keeping the Faith” feature that included material taken — whole cloth in one instance — from other authors and presented as their own work.

I want to be clear that these instances involved material sent in by the public, not Star journalists. We were alerted by eagle-eyed readers after the letter and one “Keeping the Faith” piece were published. The other was discovered before publication.

You’re taking words another person wrote, putting your name on them and pretending they’re your creation.

Plagiarism can be a lifted phrase, sentence, paragraph or whole piece. It happens when you include another’s work and ideas into your own without clearly attributing it to the original source whether that’s writing, research, music, art, cartooning, design or other intellectual endeavor.

Here’s how Miami Herald columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts Jr. described it in a 2005 piece he wrote about being plagiarized:

“Put it like this: I had a house burglarized once. This reminds me of that. Same sense of violation, same apoplectic disbelief that someone has the testicular fortitude to come into your place and take what is yours.”

See what I did there? I attributed the passage to Pitts and included the source material — his 2005 column. If I’d left off the quotation marks and didn’t include his name as the author, the reader would reasonably think that his words were mine because my name is in the byline — and that would be plagiarism.

“The dictionary is a big book. Get your own damn words. Leave mine alone,” Pitts wrote. This is another way to do an attribution, at the end of a sentence. If I hadn’t cited him in a previous paragraph I would need to include the Miami Herald and 2005 details here.

Taking another’s work and playing what I call the thesaurus game — rewriting it slightly with synonyms, changing verb tenses or rearranging sentence structure with attribution — is also plagiarism.

It is better to summarize the information in your own words and still attribute the source, but without the quotation marks because your paraphrasing means the words aren’t a direct, verbatim quote from someone else. This is often the most succinct and reader-friendly way to include statistics, poll findings or other data in your writing.

You can also plagiarize yourself by recycling something you wrote for one work in another without making it clear it’s being reused. For example, if I were to take this column and pitch it to another publication as if I wrote it for them, that would be self-plagiarism and unethical.

Opinion Coordinator Sara Brown started “Keeping the Faith” when the pandemic forced people to stay at home last year. She invites local faith leaders to share their words of wisdom and inspiration with Star readers on Sundays.

Sara said she was shocked by the plagiarism. (Note: This is how to paraphrase and attribute it.)

“I keep hearing the word ‘borrowed’ from these church leaders. I think there is a misunderstanding with that word — ‘borrowed’ implies you give something back. How do you borrow something someone else has written and put your name on it then return it to the person? It’s not possible,” Sara said.

Plagiarism is absolutely avoidable. Just remember:

Anything from a source other than your own brain needs attribution.

Think of quotation marks as a hug, keeping someone else’s words safe in what you’re writing.

We look forward to reading your words. Send them to us at tucson.com/opinion