3: Why Must I Document

Sometimes in academic work (and later in professional research) we come across an author who has described a procedure or explained a concept particularly well -- better than we could ever hope to do on our own. If we wish to use a similar passage in our own work, it might take hours of rewriting and reorganizing -- changing "the outer shell of the unit" to "the unit's external surface" and so forth. During that laborious process, grammatical mistakes are bound to creep in. Our own lack of expertise might lead to technical inaccuracies as well. When we consider all these potential problems, simply using the original passage -- without making any changes to it -- appears to be a very attractive time-saver.


Is it ethical of me to use the exact words of another author in my own work?

1. Yes! it's acceptable
2. No! That plagiarism!.
3. Hey, that's a trick question!