Plagiarism and Secondary Sources

Plagiarism is the act of using someone else's exact words or ideas in your own paper or speech without proper citation, which either blatantly or inadvertently claims the work as your own. Basically, when you commit plagiarism, you're using another person's work without giving them credit for it.

Plagiarism can be easily avoided, in my opinion. First of all, use your own words. I know that sounds basic, and it's not always easy, but it's the first way to avoid plagiarism. After reading from a certain source, try to develop your own ideas. You can also summarize and paraphrase your source's exact words if you are writing a review of that source or presenting information from it. Lastly, use quotation marks. By putting quotation marks around a word or sentence, you are directly stating "these are not my words, but are someone else's." Just don't forget to acknowledge exactly whose words they are (i.e. According to Matthew Bentley, "these are not my words, but are someone else's."

Now, for my paper on the social impacts of the 9/11 attacks, I have identified a few secondary sources including "What Lessons Did We Learn (or Re-Learn) About Military Advising After 9/11?" "Generation 9-11," and "How 9/11 Changed Our Culture" which are all news articles written after the September 11th attacks regarding lessons learned and how society was changed after those attacks. I think these sources will prove to be helpful in my paper for this reason.