18 Example of Plagiarism

Original text:

Bad winters remained a serious cause of distress in London up until the middle of the 1890s. There were harsh winters in 1879, 1880, 1881, 1886, 1887, 1891, and lastly in 1895 when once again the Thames was immobilized by floating blocks of ice. The distress in that year was sufficient to merit a Parliamentary commission of inquiry into the causes of the distress. This concluded that severe winters did not merely result in the unemployment of riverside and building workers, but also extended distress into all trades which depended upon the work of wives and daughters to sustain the unemployed husband through the slack season. Wives engaged in sweated homework tended only to work when their husbands were unemployed. The effect of bad weather was to push many more wives than usual into the labour market, and the result of this heightened competition was to spread the effects of the distress into groups of workers not directly affected by climatic conditions.⁴

Plagiarism:

In the 1880s and 1890s, London experienced a series of harsh winters which caused serious distress in the city. Floating blocks of ice blocked the Thames, increasing unemployment among riverside and building workers. More wives than usual were pushed into the labour market, increasing the competition for work and spreading distress among workers not directly affected by the bad weather.⁵

In this case, the borrowed words are merely shuffled around.

Proper use:

The economic structure of London was such that until the 1890s, bad winters had repercussions for the working classes of the entire city. When the Thames was closed to river traffic by ice, not only were the dock workers out of work, but their wives were obligated to enter the labour market in order to supplement the household income. The sudden glut of presumably cheap labour caused problems for many of the city’s workers.⁶