Avoiding Plagiarism

For any form of academic and non-academic writing, like essays, thesis, feature articles, research papers or even fiction, one has to conduct a thorough research. And while crafting a research based piece of writing it is very important to avoid 'lifting' things from the material we use for research. But there is only a thin line between taking inspiration and plagiarism. In the following paragraphs I have given some easy tips that make recognizing and avoiding plagiarism easier. Although the focus of this article is to provide a student guide to avoid plagiarism that occurs in academic writing, it can also be applied to other forms of writing.

Avoiding Plagiarism - Tutorial

What is Plagiarism
Before I say anything about how to avoid plagiarism, I would like to brief you on what practices fall under plagiarism. By standard definition plagiarism means presenting someone else's work as your own. It doesn't just include copying something word to word but also takes into account copying ideas, observations and inferences. You can definitely borrow these things by giving proper credit to the people who originated them. But if you don't do that, it will be termed as plagiarism. Even disguising the original piece by reworking falls under plagiarism. For instance, if you write an essay by rephrasing sentences from your research material, it will be plagiarism.

Types of Plagiarism
Actually, the ways in which something can be plagiarized have been mentioned in the above paragraph but there are some special cases and some other different types of plagiarism which are mentioned here. The first and the most obvious type is direct lifting of the entire work of parts of it. We have also seen partial plagiarism that involves reworking or rehashing an original piece. Both the above types are easy to recognize. Internet plagiarism mostly includes the partial type of plagiarism.

The third type of plagiarism is the one in which the source of the original work is cited, but not completely or incorrectly. Ideally, if you are citing someone, you should clearly indicate the part that has been used from that source along with the name of the author and where the work was published. An easy way to ensure proper citing is putting quotes at the start and end of the copied part.

There is another type of plagiarism called self-plagiarism. Its meaning is self-explanatory but still here is a small explanation of it. When you create a new piece of writing based on a thought or concept on which you have already written something else, it is termed as self-plagiarism. Many content based websites practice this type of plagiarism by creating a lot of content on a single subject. You will find many examples of plagiarism of this type on the Internet.

Tips for Avoiding Plagiarism
Here are some simple ways to avoid plagiarism without much effort.

• Sometimes plagiarism might happen without you meaning to do it. To avoid that take your time and conduct a good amount of research.
• When you have researched a topic well, it becomes easier for you to form your own opinion on the topic. And that is the most important thing.
• Distinguish between facts and opinion. Because you can directly use facts by quoting the source but you cannot copy a person's opinion.
• If you have derived inspiration for your work from somewhere mention that too but don't base your entire piece on it. You should have something to say of your own too.
• Break down your topic into subtopics and research on all of them separately. This helps a lot in preventing plagiarism.

That was all I could put together on avoiding plagiarism. But the topic has many more aspects and dimensions. You can read how can you prevent plagiarism for more information on the topic.