7.4 Karan’s Story

When Karan studied in India, he wasn’t expected to cite. When he started studying in Canada, he was surprised by the length of the writing assignments. He didn’t know how to use sources, so he copied and pasted a few paragraphs into his assignment and hoped he’d done it right.

He was worried when his teacher asked to meet with him. She said that he’d plagiarized, and that he could get into a lot of trouble. Luckily, Karan’s teacher decided to help him and not report him. She explained that in North American schools, you must distinguish between what words are yours and what come from the source, and what ideas are yours and what come from the source. Karan learned to use quotation marks to show what words came from the source, and to paraphrase by never looking directly at the source.