Plagiarism is a popular evil and to define plagiarism, one can simply say it refers to making use of another’s ideas or written work without proper referencing or acknowledgment. It is very rampant and such an easy crime to commit that makes one wonder if it is possible to avoid plagiarism. A quick search of Google, Quora and other search engines or question and answer sites, would show that so many people often ask questions like, “How to avoid plagiarism,” and “Where can I find a plagiarism checker.” Plagiarism causes a great deal of harm to both students and professionals alike, as students risk losing marks and professionals risk losing jobs and credibility once they have been accused of copying someone else’s work. So many persons who conduct research or create written content often make use of safeassign checker or other plagiarism checkers to ensure their works are as unique as possible.
There are different kinds of plagiarism out there, and I would mention some of them to keep you informed and help you avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism occurs when the following happens:
When you copy a text verbatim without including its source material or placing the text in quotation marks.
When you cite an incorrect source, or you make up one to simply fulfill all righteousness, that is basically plagiarism. In fact, many do not know that copying a thesaurus or even a dictionary, without referencing it, counts because it means that you are taking the credit for the hard work of another person. Not referencing a dictionary means you came up with the definition yourself.
When you submit a colleague’s report as yours
When you reuse another author’s piece of work and slightly restructure all of it
When you submit a fellow student’s assignment as yours
When you paraphrase the words of someone else without referencing them; so many people believe that paraphrasing saves them from the error of plagiarism, but often enough this is wrong because the very core of the information is part of what you are copying, not just the way the phrase or statement was typed out.
When you pay someone else to create a write-up for you on a subject.
If you use “copy and paste” or “find and replace” when creating your write-ups because you want to make your works accurate, the problem here is you are unwilling to properly do the research and create a unique document.
This is just a few of the forms in which plagiarism can occur, but instead of plaguing you with these, it is important to teach you how to avoid it. Avoiding plagiarism comes in three steps, namely; before the writing, during the writing and after the writing. Before writing an article, it is important to conduct your research properly and put down all the correct citations you are going to make use of so that you would properly reference them in the write-up and prevent problems for yourself. During the writing of your article, you must ensure that all the various references and citations are put in place, and you have fully completed the work so there are no possibilities that you could have copied someone else’s work without giving them due credit for it, thus admitting that all the ideas are not of your own creation. Furthermore, after you have completed the write-up, you run it through a plagiarism checker except, of course, you want to manually assess it yourself. This allows you to make sure you have fully perfected your piece, and in the occasion you have made mistakes and omitted certain references or paraphrased the work of another, you can correct this and simply avoid plagiarism by using a decent checker.
Another way to avoid plagiarism is by properly quoting the source which the quote appears in and use the quote exactly as it appears because no one wants to be wrongly quoted. However, if you are in a higher institution like a University or College, and even some High Schools, you will need to paraphrase reasonably because some lecturers or teachers hate ‘blockquotes’ or quotes that contain up to 40 words or even more. While the process of paraphrasing might take a very long time, the effort would eventually pay off because you would have gotten yourself out of any kind of trouble and when quoting is properly done, it prevents accusations of plagiarism. Furthermore, you might be wondering how to avoid plagiarism since you have put down all parts of the text already, if it is something bulky which contains hundreds and thousands of words, you would not want to go through all of it by yourself, in fact, you would be unable to properly do this without making so very major mistakes. Therefore, plagiarism checkers exist, and luckily, some of them are free and can be accessed easily on the internet.
Plagiarism starts off as a simple mistake and spirals into something more, and unfortunately, one of the major factors that cause so many to commit the offense of plagiarism is lack of time. Many people are trying to beat their deadlines, and trying to put something together quickly they do not often include citations or run their write-up through a plagiarism checker which causes them to get into so much trouble at work or at school. If people could learn to manage their time using the Alpen Method of time management, they would find more time to run their articles through plagiarism checkers and avoid any accusations.
Quite frankly, during your struggle to avoid plagiarism, you must make sure you teach yourself as much as possible all you need to know about the various kinds of plagiarism, there are more to those I have already listed above, and you need to figure out which stands a higher risk of affecting you negatively. You are also to learn all you can on how to avoid plagiarism by learning the things you can do not to be accused of it. Those I have mentioned above are only some of the bunch and thus might not be enough, hence, it is necessary to do your own research to be sure that you are getting things right. You must also be able to identify legitimate and accurate plagiarism checkers that would help you deliver the perfect finish to the creation of your unique essay. In conclusion, carry out the right research, learn how to avoid plagiarism, make notes, and run your article through a good plagiarism checker so you can properly avoid plagiarism.
This content is brought to you by the FingerLakes1.com Team. Support our mission by visiting www.patreon.com/fl1 or learn how you send us your local content here.