Avoiding Plagiarism: Example 1. Unacknowledged quotation

Below is some text from the book What Is a Dog?

The reason the earth can support a population of 850 million "village dogs" is because human beings have — inadvertently — provided them with a niche. This niche is an environment in which dogs have survived for centuries. If humans were to disappear, the village dog niche would disappear, and dogs would go extinct. Dogs could not take up residence in the wild because that niche is already taken — by wolves, coyotes, and jackals.

Below is the text from What Is a Dog? as it appears in a student's essay

The reason the earth can support a population of 850 million village dogs is because human beings have — inadvertently — provided them with a niche. This niche is an environment in which dogs have survived for centuries. If humans were to disappear, the village dog niche would disappear, and dogs would go extinct. Dogs could not take up residence in the wild because that niche is already taken — by wolves, coyotes, and jackals.

Why is this plagiarism?

The writer did not use quotation marks to indicate that the words are quoted from a book.

• If the writer was following APA style, the quotation would have been formatted as a block quotation. According to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, "If the quotation comprises 40 or more words, display it in a freestanding block of text and omit the quotation marks" (p. 170). See block quotation examples.
• If the writer was following MLA style, the quotation would have been formatted as a block quotation if it occupied more than four lines of the writer's text. According to the MLA Handbook, "If a quotation extends to more than four lines when run into your text, set it off from the text as a block indented half an inch from the left margin" (76).