This is, perhaps, the most blatant form of plagiarism as well as the easiest for instructors to detect. After all, English instructors have spent years studying style, and they can usually recognize a passage lifted from Time magazine or other sources with distinctive styles. In fact, instructors can usually recognize professional writing, even if they cannot immediately identify its source. But plagiarism takes several other forms. For instance, students plagiarize when they borrow ideas from other writers without giving them credit.
Students also plagiarize when they present another student's work as their own.
Thus, documentation involves more than just citing the source of direct quotations. All significant words, phrases, clauses, or passages in a student's paper which have been taken directly from source material must be enclosed in quotation marks and acknowledged either in the text itself or in the endnotes. Plagiarism includes borrowing without acknowledgement another writer's general plan, outline, or structure of argument in the creation of one's own organization. Plagiarism includes borrowing another's ideas and representing them as one's own. To paraphrase the thoughts of another writer without acknowledging is to plagiarize.