Puzzle piece plagiarism

Most plagiarism I have seen is accidental, and it happens because people don't understand what plagiarism looks like. They have heard the advice to "put it in your own words" but don't know how to do that without plagiarizing, not even realizing that what they've written isn't their own. One example of accidental plagiarism is what I call puzzle piece plagiarism. In their attempts to not plagiarize, people take a sentence they've read by an author and move the parts around, thinking that's how to "put it in your own words." For example, let's say the original sentence went like this: Bell bottoms were the most popular pants in the 1970's. It is plagiarism if it is rewritten like this: In the 1970's the most popular pants were bell bottoms. All that's happened is the original sentence was cut up and moved around. Sometimes people argue that if they put the author's name in in-text citation after the sentence then it's not plagiarized. However logical that might seem, it is still wrong because the words were copied and flipped from the original source. To learn how to borrow ideas from an author but truly "put it in your own words" see my other posts under the plagiarism label.