Is it plagiarism to copy formulations from others?

Question

As a non-native speaker of english, I often struggle with always finding new, well-sounding, non-repetitive descriptions for the same thing and I also, to be honest, find it a waste of time of always having to do something different. For example:

Section 1 describes the X while section 2 is about the Y. The Z is explained in section 3 and section 4 refers to A. The next section is about B...

Is it ok to just copy the formulation of someone else (of course my X,Y,Z,... are completely different) and always use the same thing?

Answer 1

Sentence patterns are not intellectual property; otherwise, every author who wrote "To X or not to X" would be plagiarizing Shakespeare. (They are "riffing" off of him, but not plagiarizing!)

The example you are citing is perfectly innocuous, particularly since you are not doing anything more than summarizing the paper contents. The only thing that would make it wrong would be to copy those sentences directly from someone else's work.

Answer 2

There is a fine line between copying and plagiarism. In general the answer would be no, copying would be plagiarism. However, with certain fomulations there may be limited ways to vary. If the text you copy has some intellectual value, the result of someones inventiveness more than just lining up words to form a sentence, then the formulation has intellectual value and should be referenced, not for th eEnglish but for its content. A trivial sentence is just language and it is not unlikely that one would formulate a sentence identically to someone else. We also learn language from looking at how others (who we believe are better than ourselves) may express themselves. This is not plagiarism.

So for me the critical issue is if there is content other than linguistics that is being copied, if so then plagiarism is round the corner. So as a final statement, I would say: better safe than sorry; don't copy stuff, try to use the linguistic formulation but write the sentence with your word. Learn grammar and speling by checking what others do and emulate, not copy.

Answer 3

If in doubt, just repeat yourself.

One of the things that stands out about reading papers written by poor English speakers is the ugly contortions they go to in order to avoid repeating themselves. "X is about Y. Z is about W. A is about B" may be repetitive but it's perfectly understandable. I would suggest that you do this rather than attempting to copy the form of another writer, I'd also note that your assumption that you can simply lift the same form each time and have it look right may well be wrong anyway.

I realise this doesn't answer the question you actually posed but I think it deals with the question you need answering.

Answer 4

No, your example is definitely not plagiarism.

More generally, you can refer to the book "Writing for Computer Science" by Justin Zobel (Second edition, p.65, Section Quotations) to decide when to quote and when to merely copy:

"note that it is not essential to quote such a dull statement as (...); paraphrase, or even simply omitting the quote symbols, would be more appropriate. Omisission of quotation marks in this case is acceptable--that is, not plagiarism--because (this) statement is a natural way to express the concept."