How to be a student 是 Harriet Swain 在《卫报》教育版为大学新生撰写的一个系列，今天说的是如何在作业中如何避免无意中剽窃他人劳动。

The best way to avoid plagiarism is to avoid reading anything written by somebody else. Unfortunately, this is not really what higher education is supposed to be about. While university teachers prize originality, they are not so keen on students relying entirely on imagination. By original thought, they tend to mean thinking something new about the thoughts of lots of other people, rather than just making it up.

So you need to remember two things: first, that not all the brilliant insights you use in your assignment will be your own; and second, the names of all those other people involved so you can give them a mention.

This comes down to efficient note-taking. Always write down the source of anything you consult, including that clever third-year who wrote a similar essay last year. Be methodical and accurate. Note the title of a book or website reference, author, date and page number so that you, and anybody else, will be able to check later where a particular idea came from. You also need to ask about the referencing rules of your institution and/or tutor and make sure you keep to them.

When making notes, distinguish between your own profound thoughts on the text and the text itself. The text is usually the one that's a lot longer. This is your chance to devise a colour-coded system of notes to differentiate your thoughts, those of an author, and those of your tutor. Don't make it so complicated that you keep forgetting which is which colour.

It is also the time to use plenty of quotation marks so you know what are direct lifts and what you have put in your own words. Don't forget that even if you paraphrase someone else's ideas you still need to mention whose they are. And even if you acknowledge the source properly, an essay still counts as someone else's work if you find you need quotation marks around the whole thing - or even around most of it.

When paraphrasing an argument, it is a good idea to close the book you are consulting to make sure you are not copying it by mistake. (This technique is less useful if you sneak a few peaks or have a really good memory.)

If you cut and paste from a website, you are definitely copying, even if you remember to reformat it so it looks like the rest of your essay, and change the spelling from American to English. If you don't even remember to take these steps you deserve all you get.

And you could be caught, warns Jude Carroll, who has written a handbook on deterring plagiarism in higher education. She says that any "smoking guns", such as different fonts, spacing and margins, or anachronisms left in an essay, will force teachers to report you because their self-esteem won't allow anything else.

In any case, most teachers now use plagiarism detection software that may well catch you out.

You don't need to worry about giving a reference if you refer to a fact that is commonly known. But a commonly known fact is not the same thing as something that is commonly available on the internet, or that everyone else in your class knows because they heard it from that clever third year.

Even if you don't feel guilty, always read through an assignment to check that you haven't plagiarised accidentally. Make sure you have cited a source every time you use it, and look closely at any paragraphs without references to see if they really are all your own work or should be attributed to that helpful internet essay bank.