What did the student do wrong? What could he/she have done to include the source correctly?
The student who plagiarized the passage from A Brief Understanding of the Starry Night Paintings violated the rights of the author (unknown) of the article. The article was written to be read and appreciated as an analysis of the painting, not as free to be stolen. Plagiarism is a form of theft, because it's taking something somebody deserves credit for because it's their work, and taking credit for the time and effort they themselves put into it, not you. It's stealing time, hard work, and honesty. The student, in order to correctly include the source, could have copy & pasted the passage but put it in quotation marks and cite the source. They also could have paraphrased and said the same idea using different words.
Write a sentence using the original source correctly; use a quotation or paraphrase. Also, make sure to cite correctly.
Original sentence: "This sky keeps the viewer's eyes moving about the painting, following the curves and creating a visual dot to dot with the stars." (http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starryindex.html)
Paraphrased: The night sky in the painting lets the person looking at it follow the stars like a pattern, and keeps their eyes moving along the swirls.
What are at least 3 ways to avoid plagiarizing?
The three ways to avoid plagiarizing are really very easy. The first is quotation, which is including a passage from the original text but putting it in quotation marks ("") and citing the source correctly. The second is paraphrasing, my personal favorite, which is keeping the idea from the source but stating it using different words (see above.) The third way is summarizing, which is taking information from a source, putting it in different words, and minimizing it, trimming it down to main ideas.
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