Plagiarism has the obvious black and white area where one can tell something is plagiarized when it is directly copied word for word without any parenthesis nor citations. The Gray area is what one must learn to keep oneself from plagiarizing. Paraphrasing, though not directly copying ones work word for word, should still be citied, or is considered plagiarism. Someone else's ideas should be credited to that person or else it is also plagiarism. A photo, graph or table copied from a source should be citied precisely.
To keep oneself from plagiarizing, try these following techniques. Make sure to cite everything correctly; author, source i.e. book, journal, page number, footnote, etc. One should be sure to take notes carefully. If interviewing make sure to note your own thoughts differently than those from the person you are interviewing. One should be careful in writing their bibliography page. Another thing that a person must do is to keep ahold of all their drafts. If a student gets a copy of another's draft they could use it as their own and then the original author might be accused of plagiarizing.
The sites I found information on plagiarism can be found at the following links.
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