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How Plagiarism Sneaks into Your Essays?

One of the biggest problems the academic community has to deal with is plagiarism. This is a question of professionalism, ethics, and cooperation of researchers who share the same knowledge field. When you commit plagiarism at college, professors might forgive you only if they see that it was an act of silly despair. When you copy someone’s work or submit a paper, you have found on the web as your own, teachers might guess that you just didn’t have time and knowledge to deal with an assignment. However, if you are not lucky and your professors are tough, the punishment can be as serious as expulsion.

Indeed, some lazy students prefer to steal information on purpose and realize that they commit academic fraud. Simultaneously, the real problem with plagiarism is that you can commit it by accident without even noticing. That’s right, you may fail to format your quotations correctly because you were in a hurry. Sometimes, students paraphrase the words of other authors and dismiss the necessity to mention their names. So-called “grey areas” also need citations, but students forget about this too often. Also, learners simplify the issue when they believe that information found in several books or encyclopedias can be perceived as common knowledge and therefore doesn’t need to be cited. The same happens with web-based sources. Such thinking is incorrect and can lead to unpleasant consequences.

How to avoid that?

Avoiding plagiarism and learning how to write A-winning papers is necessary for your academic career. You need to develop this skill before you appear at the university or workplace. Here are things you should pay attention to:

• Online sources require your consideration

When you paraphrase or use online materials, the necessity to mention their authors remains. You are responsible for your paper’s content, quality of sources, and the relevance of your reflections. What is more, using online sources, you should be even more attentive and accurate than ever – the credibility of them is lower than books and journals have. This means that you need to pay special attention to the websites and their level of trustworthiness before you quote them.

• Mind the relationships of your ideas and quotes

Sometimes, when you compose an academic paper, the citations and other people’s ideas can get lost in the text. You must comment and interpret the information you use, and when you do so, there is a risk that your ideas and thoughts of other people will mix. Try not to slip up somewhere and differentiate your comments from quotes. Make it obvious in the text and mark paraphrased areas clearly.

• Format quotations in the process of writing

Some students prefer to format quotations when the paper is done. This is a big mistake – you will definitely forget something. Remember that using sources is not a matter of mechanics – they are the core of your work. You should insert the quotations into the context naturally and make them support the argument. Make sure that you mark them in the process of writing.

Conclusion

When you have a short deadline to meet and a pretty extensive project to write, you may find yourself browsing the web madly and copying everything related to your topic. Then, when you have 10 hours before the submission, you try to process this data anyhow, failing to create a structured and well-thought piece. The norm of some students is to take the retrieved information, insert it into the word processor or simply rewrite manually instead of working on the project accurately. As such, they end up lifting large pieces of text from outside sources. Students hope that such papers will look like their work and loudly assure themselves that college overload is enormous, and they had to work under pressure.

If you recognize yourself, well, the time has come to change something. Even if some of your minor essays and college projects were done this way without troubles, you would definitely face a catastrophe when the time to write a dissertation will come. Mind this issue and learn to compose high-quality papers during your college years. Keep these tips in mind, site your sources smartly, and good luck with your writing!