How to Avoid Plagiarism?: In this era of modern technology and the boom of the internet, knowledge, and content is readily available all over the web. With this vast amount of information present online, it is difficult to avoid plagiarism as a writer.
With so many words, ideas, and content, plagiarism has become very common. However, this is something that one must avoid as it has many effects on any individual or organization’s legal and moral perspectives.
Plagiarism can sometimes become an inevitable circumstance where you are forced to ‘borrow’ phrases, facts, and ideas. However, the issue emerges when you fail to acknowledge the source appropriately.
To avoid plagiarism, these instances necessitate correct citation, reference, quoting, or paraphrasing. If you do not follow these, you are just ‘copying’ the immoral information, resulting in penalties and possible legal action.
Plagiarism, however, can be avoided. You must understand that though there are limited words, ideas, and facts, content is still being created, and not all are plagiarized.
In this article, we will discuss what plagiarism is, what leads to plagiarism, what are its effects, how to remove plagiarism from your content, if any, what are the five steps to avoid plagiarism at all, and how to copy and paste without plagiarism taking any effect on your content.
How to Avoid Plagiarism?
- What is ‘Plagiarism’?
- What leads to plagiarism?
- Consequences of Plagiarism
- Five Steps to Avoid Plagiarism
What is ‘Plagiarism’?
Plagiarism is fundamentally an ethical issue. A writer who submits copied material is committing theft intending to benefit from it. Whether you’re offering a school paper for grades or working as a writer for a living, this is true.
As a writer, avoiding plagiarism is critical since it jeopardizes your integrity. Apart from losing the respect of your mentors and peers, you may also lose crucial professional references and potential career advancement.
Plagiarism may result in the loss of financial aid or leadership responsibilities if you are still in school.
Furthermore, it takes credit or profit away from the original creator of the material, resulting in additional difficulty if the source takes legal action against you.
What leads to plagiarism?
In a nutshell, it is claiming someone else’s work as their own. When a user fails to acknowledge the source correctly, he is passing the work off as their own. It’s the same as stealing someone else’s property. The following are some of the causes that may lead to plagiarism.
Direct content copying or claiming someone else’s work as your own.
You are using sentences or ideas from a source in which the sentence structure is given a new format but not appropriately utilized text citations. If you do not cite the source, you are not crediting the original author and committing plagiarism.
When copying a phrase or paragraph from another source, quotation marks are required. You will wind up plagiarizing the content if you do not quote it.
Usually, there is a lot of hard facts to present in academic articles. Complex data are those that are based on facts that you cannot change in any way. As a result, students likely end up borrowing many words and concepts from the source. When not adequately acknowledged, it results in unintentional plagiarism.
Plagiarism might also result from citing the incorrect source. You purposefully or accidentally extract content from one source and mention another, resulting in a copyright violation. As a result, one must ensure that one cites the correct sources to avoid plagiarism online.
Consequences of Plagiarism
If you do not consider how to prevent plagiarism, you may incur the negative consequences of plagiarism. The results may be ethical, professional, personal, or even legal. Plagiarism can harm professional writers, academics, students, journalists, researchers, and others who engage with textual documents.
Impact on Students
Students are frequently caught plagiarizing academic articles such as term papers and essays. This situation is taken very seriously by educational institutions. When students are detected plagiarizing, the authorities may issue a warning. A subsequent offence may result in the student being suspended or expelled, as well as a drop in grades.
Impact on Professionals
A professional writer of any type must maintain the originality of his work, which directly impacts his reputation. A plagiarized article will ruin his reputation, which would be disheartening and result in a career setback.
Impact on Academic Institutions
Institutions, in particular, should be aware of how to avoid online plagiarism, which all boils down to status. Students and professors may occasionally plagiarize research articles, which is terrible for their reputation and bad for academia.
Legal Impacts
In severe cases of plagiarism, the original owner of the text may seek civil charges against the plagiarizing individual or organization. As a result, legal actions may be taken.
Penalties
If the original author charges the plagiarizer, they may face fines and penalties. Financial penalties are determined to be pretty severe in some circumstances.
Five Steps to Avoid Plagiarism
Avoiding plagiarism is not that difficult. There are five key things that you must keep in mind before you start with your writing. If you do these steps, you should not face any issues regarding plagiarism.
Citing the Sources
When referring to someone’s concept or phrasing, include a citation in your writing that consists of the source’s name, the date it was published, and any other citation elements needed by the style guide you’re using.
Putting in Quotations
If you use a source’s words precisely in your writing, one of the most straightforward yet most apparent ways to avoid plagiarism is to include quotation marks around the text. This indicates that the words aren’t your own. A straight quote must also have the source so that readers know who said it.
Paraphrasing
The process of rewriting a source’s ideas or facts into your own words without affecting its meaning is known as paraphrasing. But be careful—if done incorrectly, paraphrasing might turn into plagiarism.
It takes some effort to paraphrase without plagiarizing successfully. Try to avoid utilizing too many identical terms or phrases from the source while rewording and formatting your content. The trick is to do so without changing the meaning of the concept itself. Remember, you’re still borrowing someone else’s concept, so provide a citation to the source.
Presenting your Ideas
Rather than just repeating the source’s concepts or phrases, consider what you say about it. Consider what unique perspective and point of view you can provide to work by yourself. Remember that whether you use a source’s words or ideas to create your thesis, you must follow the principles above to prevent plagiarizing.
When writing on the same topic for many projects, it can be tempting to reuse some of your earlier words—this is known as “self-plagiarism.” If the publication or your instructor did not permit you to duplicate your previous work, the risk of self-plagiarism is just as high.
Using a Plagiarism Checker
While researching a particular topic, some phrases or sentences may be on your mind so firmly that you unconsciously integrate them into your work without citing them. When in doubt, an online plagiarism checking tool can assist you in detecting these flaws before submitting your paper.
There are several online plagiarism checkers that you can use for free to avoid any plagiarized work in your writings. These programmers will tell you whether or not sections of your paper are plagiarized, and some will even underline the plagiarized words or sentences and explain where the text came from.
If you can keep the steps mentioned above in mind, you can rest assured to be safe from facing any trouble regarding plagiarism. A small suggestion is that you cannot always avoid plagiarism, and there is no way to copy and paste someone else’s writing into your article. You must know the correct ways to prevent any of the problems mentioned above are.
