Plagiarism

To Katrina

Plagiarism considered under the oxford dictionary website (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/plagiarism) states that "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own". The passage that was handed in is considered plagiarism, because it is already presented in a book, not everyone has such knowledge of the definition middle English and your passage is too closely to the actual literature. To begin, anything that is presented in a book needs to be citied. You need to give some credit somewhere to C. Hugh Holma's a Handbook to Literature in your passage, or the reader will think that this knowledge comes from you the writer. Furthermore, not everyone knows the definition of Middle English, and needs to be researched in order to find the definition. So your argument of its common knowledge cannot be used. Lastly I can see that you paraphrased the literature; however, your passage is way too close to the actually C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature. In fact in reading your passage it looks almost identical to the literature and just seems like a few words were just change by a thesaurus. Katrina your passage is not your own version it was already expressed by someone else and was not presented in a new form. That is why I am considering your passage as an example of plagiarism. Katrina in future papers if you're using any ideas or words from a book, newspaper etc. it needs to be cited and credited.