Steering Clear of Plagiarism: Ensuring Originality in Narrative Essay Writing

Do you know what Martin Luther King Jr. (an American civil rights activist), Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (a German politician), and Rene Diekstra (a Dutch psychologist) have in common?

All three have been accused of plagiarism. Plagiarism is borderline blasphemy – it is theft of intellectual property and an act of dishonesty. Unfortunately, even the brightest minds and prolific writers in our society are often tempted to steal someone else’s ideas. However, it is a severe offence that can lead to your paper being thrown out. You surely wouldn’t want that to happen after putting in countless hours of work writing your narrative essay.

So, how to avoid the scary scenario? You can always seek assistance from professional essay writers online, and it should help, but there are certainly other ways you can use to prevent this issue. Once you know the necessity of avoiding plagiarism, you will stand a remarkable chance at implementing foolproof strategies that can help you stay out of trouble effectively.

Stick around to know certain actionable strategies that will enable you to prevent plagiarism at all costs and become successful in the long run.

v  Use Direct Quotes or Do Not Quote

According to a 7-year research study by Donal McCabe of more than 70,000 school students, 64% confessed to cheating on a test, 58% confessed to plagiarising content, and 95% admitted to certain forms of cheating. However, it is severely frowned upon by educators and may lead to expulsion or even jeopardization of a career. Learn from Guttenberg who not only had to resign from his position in the German government and his doctorate was pronounced invalid, but his hard-earned reputation was crushed in seconds.

Often, in your research, you will come across a passage that establishes a point so brilliantly that you can’t think of saying it any other way. There’s nothing wrong with copying such statements in your paper but be incredibly careful how you do it. Simply adding a citation to the source is not enough. It is also crucial to put the copied language in quotation marks. Without quotation marks, you will be giving your reader the impression that you wrote the passage by yourself. If you struggle to use quotes correctly, ensure to seek assistance from a reputed academic website like MyAssignmenthelp.expert. 

v  Paraphrase the Original Text

Paraphrasing has been inappropriately touted as the key way to avoid plagiarism. However, unless it is done accurately, paraphrasing sentences from source articles and websites without due acknowledgement still counts as plagiarism. This is because plagiarism doesn’t focus only on sentence structure and style but mainly on the idea conveyed through the sentences.

To avoid plagiarism effectively, express the author’s ideas in your voice. Merely changing an active to a passive sentence or using synonyms can expose one to the risk of accidental plagiarism. Finally, for each citation made in a paper, you must cross-check the resource to make sure that the ideas have been accurately expressed in the paper.

v  Give Credit Where It is Due

Even if you remember to use quotation marks around any copied passage of 15 words or more, you are still capable of committing plagiarism if you completely depend on someone else’s words or ideas without giving the person the necessary credit.

For instance, you are asked to craft a paper on the American legal system, and you come across an online article with the passage – “In the American legal system, the litigants are usually responsible for paying the fees of their attorneys, irrespective of the outcomes of the case. This implies that clients who cannot afford to recruit a lawyer may be denied access to justice.”

While writing, you write, ‘People who don’t have sufficient money to recruit lawyers are effectively denied access to justice in America, since litigants are usually needed to pay their lawyers regardless of which party wins the case.’

Here, you have paraphrased the original sentence successfully, so no quotation marks are required. However, you still need to incorporate a citation to the source, so be sure to make it clear to the reader that this is not your personal opinion but instead an observation made by someone else. 

v  Footnote as You Go

Even when you’re simply writing a rough draft, it’s wise to insert footnotes – at least one per paragraph, and ideally even more.

The objective of these footnotes is not to offer perfectly formatted citation information but rather to offer adequate basic information to remind you of the sources you’ve used. At this stage, do not use terms like ‘id.’ Or ‘ibid.’ to refer to previous references. Rather, insert the names of the sources in every footnote so that you will remember where the ideas came from, even if you later move your sentences around. 

v  Add Value

Ensure not to use all the information you find in your resources. Try and add certain value to the topic by incorporating your crucial insights. This will help you to secure high grades anyway. It also shows that you know what you are speaking of. You can only achieve this by conducting in-depth research until you reach a point where all the information clicks automatically.

v  Use Tools Designed to Prevent Plagiarism

One final check to make sure that one is not implicated is the use of reliable plagiarism scanners. These tools offer details reports on the extent of the similarity of your paper with other published information on online databases. Sections of the paper deemed plagiarised are highlighted by these scanners to help authors make suitable changes.

However, you still need to check the work yourself, too. You can’t completely depend on a tool. After all, double-checking a paper never hurts anyone! 

To Conclude,

When you’re truly committed to writing an impeccable and flawless academic paper, tackling the issue of plagiarism won’t be that challenging. Especially if you use certain strategies on ways to avoid plagiarism that we’ve mentioned above.

To avoid plagiarism, focus on being as authentic as possible and sharing your thoughts. Looking for a shortcut or easy way out usually results in wasted time and poor writing. Hence, to succeed, you simply need the right mindset. Our foolproof techniques will help you write a paper free of plagiarism. Good luck!