What is Plagiarism and how can you avoid it?

What is Plagiarism and how can you avoid it?

To many people, plagiarism is simply copying of other people’s content. This is quite a shallow definition and does not deeply represent the actual meaning of engaging in plagiarism. In simple terms, plagiarism is taking other people ideas including content, words, illustrations among other forms of intellectual content and representing them as their own by:

• Failing to give credit to original author of the materials
• Failing to use quotation marks when quoting thoughts from an author
• Taking someone else work and presenting it as yours by copying.
• Failing to cite thoughts and ideas borrowed from other others in the way that citation ought to be done
• Overuse of other authors ideas and thoughts in your own work to an extent that such use goes against the rule of “fair use” of other people’s content
• Citing incorrectly thus failing to give credit to the author

In essence, failure to give credit to the authors of ideas and thoughts you wish to borrow as a writer is simply failing to write with integrity. Just as integrity is important in our various engagements in life, it is equally important when writing.  None of us should feel compelled to give credit to original authors of thoughts and ideas simply not to gen penalized by your tutor or lecturer when you submit your term paper. This should be an intrinsic and integral part of the writing and researching process. As we all add to the global body of knowledge, we must do so by giving credit to others who have enabled us to contribute by learning first!

It is not only term papers or academic papers! There are different types of content that most researchers, content creators and others plagiarize. Below are some examples of what may be considered an unfair use of content:

• Use of media including images in your website that has solely been lifted from other sites or webpages
• Using copyrighted music from other musicians as part of your own sound track.
• Lifting of footage from other people videos and using that as your own
• Recreation of visual work like paintings that for instance, resemble another person’s photograph

Over the years, academicians have come up with standardized ways of citing other people’s work including MLA and APA formats. This has even been incorporated in modern word processing software to assist writers in making sure that they do their writing with integrity. As you do your academic paper in school and at work, it is important to ensure that you do so with integrity by including citations and a bibliography to give credit to the other authors.

The web has also grown tremendously and a lot of tools are available to help you. There are plagiarism checkers software tools that are available online for free or at a small cost to help you do your writing without plagiarizing other people’s work. These are important in also helping you to check out for plagiarism from other writers.Order a PAPER NOW and and get 10 % off for your first Order, Use SAVETEN as your voucher code