How to Avoid Plagiarism in Your College Papers

If you’re a university student, it’s critical that you don’t plagiarise in your work. If you do, you risk failing your assignment, being suspended from school, or even being expelled. Some guidelines are obvious and should be followed to avoid plagiarizing other people’s work, but there are other subtle components to be aware of. One should never simply copy and paste another person’s work verbatim without citing the source. For the most part, pupils have little trouble grasping this concept. You can get into problems for sharing information that’s unknown to the general public, as well as for failing to credit the source. 

If one individual thinks that a given piece of information is common knowledge, another person may not believe the same. If you’re unsure, then it’s best to provide a source. The First World War of 1914-1918 is well-known, hence it may not be required to cite a source to refer to it. Even yet, if you’re going to talk about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which many believe started World War I, it’s a good idea to cite a reliable source. Learning what is acceptable and undesirable in academic writing is essential, and reading academic papers and journal articles can help you achieve this goal.

Five Techniques to Avoid Plagiarism

Fortunately, the situation isn’t as bleak as it first appears. Now that you know what plagiarism is, avoiding it should be a piece of cake. Here are some tips on how to avoid plagiarism in your writing:

1. Come Up With a Unique Idea

Instead of simply repeating what the source has to say, consider what you can add to the conversation. When you’re writing, ask yourself what unique perspective or point of view you can bring to the table. To avoid being accused of plagiarism, even if you’re making allusions to the concepts or language of another source, follow the above-mentioned rules.

It’s easy to “self-plagiarise” if you’re writing about the same subject for several different tasks at the same time. A self-plagiarism danger is as great whether or not you have permission from a publisher or your instructor to republish your old work.

2. Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is a way of recreating a source’s ideas or information into your own words, without altering the original meaning. If done incorrectly, paraphrasing might turn into plagiarism. It takes a little bit of a dance to successfully paraphrase without plagiarizing. Try to avoid using too many comparable terms or phrases from the source https://fixgerald.com/

material while rewriting and formatting your work. As long as you don’t change what the notion itself stands for, you’re on the right track! Because you’re still employing someone else’s idea, you’ll need to give credit where credit is due.

3. Cite your source

Give credit to the original writers of any words, ideas, or phrases you use, whether directly or indirectly. Whether you found the material in a book, an article, or a website, and whether it was text, a visual, an illustration, a chart, or a table, you must cite it. It’s important to include quotes from other sources. Style guides are online and at most reference desks. They may offer tips to avoid plagiarism.

4. Include Quotations

If you copy and paste the contents of another source word for word into your writing, you should enclose the text in quote marks to show that the words are not your own and that they were taken from another source. Be sure to include the author’s name in the citation so that readers will be able to determine who the author of a direct quote is.

5. Use a plagiarism Detection tool

In the course of your study, you may come across phrases or sentences that stick with you so strongly that you include them without attribution when you write. Use an online plagiarism checker if you’re unsure if your work is free of plagiarism.

Fixgerald, for example, has a plagiarism checker available online. It provides a free plagiarism checker that checks your writing for plagiarism. There is a variety of plagiarism detection software that can tell you whether or not your writing has been plagiarised, as well as which words or sentences are at risk.

Conclusion

Plagiarism is hard to avoid for most students. If you take such safeguards, you can submit your work with peace of mind. These pointers can help you avoid plagiarism in your work, and they’re well worth the time it takes to implement them. Additionally, figuring out how to avoid plagiarism is a daily exercise that takes time and effort.

Alisia Stren is well recognized as an excellent writer. Stren has been in the field of education for almost a decade, working as a teacher, a workshop facilitator, and a conference keynote speaker. As well as more than a dozen children’s novels, he has also created more than twenty professional development resources.