Table of Contents
The acting of copying someone’s content and assuming it as yours is Plagiarism. In simple words, taking another author’s work and presenting it as your own is plagiarism.
It is also considered as the act of lying to a teacher or digital platforms by representing the work you didn’t make but claiming as yours.
In the professional field, plagiarism is a serious crime. It’s different from the criteria of honesty, against the efforts of the original author, and may result in different types of penalties.
This guide will assist you to understand the ways of dealing the plagiarism but before that, let’s discuss the reasons for plagiarism.
Why students and writers plagiarize?
One of the most common reasons behind the causes of plagiarism is the lack of expertise. Another reason writers or students plagiarize is “laziness” since they do not wish to spend some time on research.
Some students will intentionally plagiarize because it is the simplest way to complete their academic assignments or projects.
However, none of these cases are acceptable. Plagiarism isn’t simply exclusive to the academic field but has also spread into other professions like journalism, literature, art, songs, etc.
How to Deal with Plagiarism?
Well, after you understand exactly what plagiarism is, and the reason why plagiarism causes, here are some basic techniques of avoiding it.
1. Give a proper time to Research
The perfect method to prevent plagiarism is to begin early so you can have sufficient time to research the topic and write extensive work.
In common, the student completes their assignment near to the submission time and they go for copying content from the internet and use it in their assignment.
Sometimes insufficient time is the thing that makes people wish to copy-paste different people’s work and present it as their very own.
Whenever you do enough research, you simplify your composing procedure. Organize your procedure so you have sufficient time to study, compose, and then proofreading.
In this manner, you’ll avoid plagiarism as you will accumulate numerous resources which it is possible to use within your whole work.
To collect enough data for your content, be sure to record down key ideas and things you’ll use on your job.
As soon as you’ve assembled a list of thoughts, you can schedule your composing for one more time; if it is after a while or even after a single day.
2. Paraphrase your content
While researching, you may do the study but still cannot locate the source that makes it hard to mention it.
Paraphrasing can be the way of avoiding plagiarism, in this case. If you are unable to find the source from which you copied the sentences, you can change the wording of the context to make some difference between your writing as well as the source.
Paraphrasing will change most of the words by their synonyms and this is possible through a paraphrasing tool for automatic changing of words.
This way, your content will be changed without altering the meaning of the text.
Paraphrasing is also a type of plagiarism, in this sense, you should do it properly. A paraphrasing tool can help you in this regard as it works on modern algorithms for better performance.
3. In-text Citation
When you add the citation, you supply all of the essential information concerning the author or the writing. This is the most common way to Avoid Plagiarism in your writing.
Various institutions have different instructions regarding the citation style needed for every paper. The average kinds of citation styles utilized in the majority of institutions comprise APA, MLA, and Chicago.
Citing content will also be useful if you’re adding your work (i.e., previous assignment) as it can cause the Self-plagiarism which is also permitted.
4. Add References
As soon as you’ve cited all of the resources you’ve used in your file, you have to offer a listing of references at the end of the paper.
There are different ways of adding the reference to your project. For instance, you can also add a separate page to your project initializing all the references on a single page.
Ensure your references are true and you should prevent misleading the readers. Normally, your references include the writer’s title, publishing date, name, and website URL.
Information on your references must adhere to this arrangement based upon the citation style necessary for the paper.
5. Check for Plagiarism
You cannot know whether your content is plagiarized or unique until you test your writing with a plagiarism checker.
The very best approach to guarantee no cases of plagiarism slide would be to utilize a plagiarism checker.
The fantastic thing is there are multiple plagiarism checkers available online; a few are free but with restricted features while some are superior with unlimited capabilities.
Just be certain to use a trusted plagiarism checker such as Check Plagiarism, Quetext, CopyScape to scan your file and find any duplicate content issues.
6. Authenticate the Resources before using
Even though there are lots of resources over the internet, not all of them allow them to copy their content.
To keep your writing out of plagiarism, you need to discover sources (both on the web and offline resources) and assess how they are before employing them.
To learn whether a source is best suited to use on your work, find out whether:
- The writer is reliable
- The info is important and credible (notice that the writer took the data from somewhere reputable)
- The date of the book (some resources are outdated).
- The facts are true (the writer supports her or his ideas or thoughts correctly).
As soon as you’ve checked that these factors are applicable, you may use the source.
7. Quote Sources
Be aware that presenting the work of another resource incorrectly may lead to plagiarism. Therefore, you should write the content under quotation marks to inform the reader about the content being copied.
It would be a plus point to quote the sentence following by a citation. This is the reason you must do enough study and write notes down when researching the topic.
