Plagiarism and Student Writing

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Plagiarism is an act of taking the work of someone else and presents it as your own without mentioning the original source of information. It is unauthorized use of someone’s ideas or writings and representation of them as one’s own work. To help you avoid plagiarism, here is a detailed discussion of different forms of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is an act of using someone’s work. Usually, it involves writing but other kinds of work can also be plagiarized like artwork, creative ideas, music, lyrics, etc. Taking credit for someone else’s work is a violation of copyright rules as well. So plagiarism is also the violation of rules and illegal activity.

Why do students plagiarize?

Students plagiarize unintentionally, having poor writing skills, lack of general knowledge, lack of understanding of a particular topic, believing that doing plagiarism is not an issue, or having a pressurized environment. The most common reason for doing plagiarism is having not an idea about plagiarism; therefore they are unaware that they are unintentionally doing wrong. A common misunderstanding among students about plagiarism relates to paraphrased material. Many students do not realize that paraphrased material should be credited to the original. Students must check plagiarism to avoid any duplication.

Examples of Plagiarism:

Here are a few examples of plagiarism.
• Using your name on someone else’s work. This is the most common example. Usually, students use this technique for their assignments.
• Using your name on someone’s phrases. Sometimes students use only a few paragraphs or sentences from the course and don’t mention the source of information, it is plagiarism. Using the whole article or information is not necessary to be plagiarism.
• Using your name on something that’s paraphrased. A paraphrase is a rewording of sentences that essentially presents the same idea but in different words. Paraphrase of someone else needs to be mention because it is still the idea of someone else.
• Using the idea of someone else. This happens usually in academic institutes. Stealing an idea of someone else is a violation of intellectual property law.
Learning a cited source correctly and honestly is a necessary skill. Failures of putting quotation marks or mentioning incorrect information about the source are sloppy errors but technically they are still plagiarism.