Instruction: Advanced Level
Video Case 1 of 2
Professor Kyles tells Shuya that when she thinks is paraphrasing in her report, she is actually committing word-for-word plagiarism because she has omitted quotation marks when she has copied more than 7 words in a row from the source. Otherwise, a reader cannot tell when Shuya is paraphrasing versus when she is directly quoting from the source.
Click on the minute-and-a-half video to watch.
How Many Words in a Row for Quotations?
For Certification Tests we use the criterion of 7 or more words in a row as part of determining when quotation marks are needed to avoid word-for-word plagiarism. See the criteria here.
Professor Kyles uses the criterion of "more than 7 words" in the video. So who's right?
When determining word-for-word versus paraphrasing plagiarism, the number of words copied in sequence from the source may vary in different academic disciplines. In some disciplines, use of quotation marks is expected when more than 3 words in a row are copied from the source. In either case, it is still plagiarism when the writer fails to give proper credit to the source.
What constitutes giving proper credit to the source is also a matter of style. For example, in APA Style, when 40 words or more in a sequence are copied from the source, those quoted words are formatted by an indented block. Quotation marks are not used for block quotations, since the indented paragraph signals whose words are whose. Very importantly, the rest of the citation must also be provided by the writer to identify the source of the quotation.
We use APA Style in this tutorial. We illustrate shorter quotations (fewer than 40 words) for which quotation marks must be used to avoid word-for-word plagiarism. The writer must also cite the author(s) of the source of the quotation, the date, and must provide a locator such as a page number.
Some Friendly Advice to Writers
When you are writing a paper and you copy exact words from someone else, put quotation marks around their words. And be sure to note the source of the quotation. Then there should be no doubt about whose words are whose, and where they came from.
Then later when editing your paper to create a final version, you can focus on elements of style such as APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.