According to standard university classroom usage at Texas A&M, plagiarism includes not only taking someone else's words or ideas and presenting them as your own, but also taking someone else's words or ideas and misrepresenting them as being from another person or from "anonymous." So you can't lift a paragraph from Jane Smith's writings and say it was written by George Brown, any more than you can take Jane's writings and say it was your own. And you can't take a quote from someone and say it is "anonymous" when you know very well who wrote it -- famous or not. Imagine citing the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address and saying it was "anonymous." Maybe there's an English prof on line who would give us a technical term to distinguish this from plagiarism in the sense of claiming someone else's work as their own. Around here, all of these things are listed under definitions of plagiarism in handouts to students on how to write term papers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D. email: [log in to unmask] Anthropology Department phone: (409) 845-5256 Texas A&M University fax: (409) 845-4070 College Station, TX 77843-4352