Imagine that you’re given a writing assignment as follows:

What is the value of your liberal-arts education?

Now, let’s imagine you find David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 (.pdf here if the link is dead) regarding his thoughts on this very topic and you decide to use parts of it in your answer. This subpage discusses what I (and probably others) would define as plagiarism.

Let’s focus on one paragraph in his address, reproduced below:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

1) Plagiarism is simply copying and pasting all/many of the words into your document from a source and NOT citing that source or including quotation marks (orange is from the original above).

I submit that this is what the real, value of a liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

If there are no quotation marks and no reference/credit given for the source, this is a clear and simple example of plagiarism.

Most plagiarism, however, does not take this form. It is more subtle.

2) Plagiarism is also picking out bits and pieces of phrases, word-for-word, and combining them with your own words (again, without using quotation marks or a citation for any of the copied bits) to make a hybrid as below (orange is from the original above).

What is the value of a liberal arts education? To me, the value of a liberal arts education is about many things, but the most important is as follows: how to keep from going through your comfortable, adult life as a sleepwalker – basically, someone who is a slave to their head and to a life of being uniquely, totally, imperially alone day in and day out.

Any phrases that are not your own must be set off with quotation marks. In the example above, if I had written everything on my own except for the phrase “imperially alone day in and day out” and had included it without quotation marks and a reference, it would still be plagiarism.

3) Finally (and most common) is the use of the order of ideas and structure of ideas from an author with a total rewrite of the actual words in the original as follows:

What is the value of a liberal arts education? To me, the value of a liberal arts education is about many things, but the most important is that it gives us an answer to the following question: How does a person proceed through their privileged, Western adulthood without becoming a sleepwalker – basically, someone who is fettered to their selfish mind and thereby cannot help but focus inward on an existence of depressing detachment from friends, coworkers, and other humans?

This is what’s called paraphrasing. If you do this, you must rearrange structure (and use your own words) and also (preferably) cite the source of the ideas in the text. If you do not rearrange structure and choose to paraphrase (meaning your own words, no quotations, but another person’s ideas and structure), you also must cite the source.

It might be ironic if I didn’t acknowledge that many of the ideas of how I define plagiarism above were taken from examples given by Princeton University’s website on academic integrity.