Plagiarism means copying someone else’s work or borrowing their original ideas and then claiming them as your own. Plagiarism includes copying from books, articles, school papers and essays, and websites.
Plagiarism sometimes includes paraphrasing. This is when you restate the meaning of someone else’s work using other words. Paraphrasing is okay so long as you provide the source of the information you’re using. If you want to use someone else's exact words, you must put the other person’s words in quotation marks and say where the quote came from.
Many schools and universities in Canada have created plagiarism policies to prevent students from stealing the work of others and help them understand what counts as plagiarism. If you have any doubts about your school work and plagiarism, ask a teacher. Simon Fraser University has some helpful Copyright FAQs