You may have met or heard of incidents that a researcher, a writer, or a public figure has been accused of plagiarism.
There is no question about the copyright infringement and intellectual dishonesty that you had even in schools.
Your education institute may have some rules and policies for addressing intellectual dishonesty and administrative proceedings as well as for resolving plagiarism incidents.
However, some of you might be concerned about what is plagiarism? What makes it a severe offense?
How would you analyze plagiarized text in your paper? Is there anything like a digital scanner for plagiarism? How can ZeroGPT’s Word Counter help track and analyze word usage in your documents as a writer, editor, and student with a powerful resources and features for precise content assessment.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism involves copying someone else’s work that can be in whole or in part and not citing it appropriately.
In other words, plagiarism demonstrates the thoughts, facts, words, or whole work of another writer as yours without giving him/her credit.
It is considered a type of serious crime because you are distorting the facts to achieve value, popularity, and money from someone else’s work.
That is why plagiarism is a serious moral and ethical offense.
Moreover, it often may lead to potential consequences, for example, sometimes it is a copyright breach – violation of an author’s sole legitimate authority of publication.
This will result in students failing an exam and being suspended from school. And if you are an employee, you might lose your job and career.
You should use quotation, paraphrase, and summary to integrate suggestions from another author into your writing.
In this article, you will learn about all possible and actionable tactics to avoid being plagiarized in schools but first, you need to understand why is it a serious issue.
Why is Plagiarism a serious matter in academics?
Students who commit plagiarism are not just perceived as immoral but also, they are considered to be inexperienced, unable to conduct proper research, and complete failure in creative writing.
Plagiarism is not restricted to just students, professional writers also vulnerable to plagiarism sometimes.
And when they are caught, their jobs will probably be lost and they face serious social embarrassment, lost reputation, and lack of popularity in the future.
Plagiarism’s accusation is serious because it questions everything about the work of the writer such as how a reader would believe if this article is misstated as actual?
Thus, plagiarism brings shame to a person’s whole career.
Schools focus upon plagiarism because they deem plagiarism the same way students do. How does a teacher trust that all of the research, if a student would not provide credit for others’ efforts in one research work?
Moreover, plagiarism accusation affects teachers’ and student relationship, make teachers suspects rather than educators, causes mistrust rather than confidence and makes it incomprehensible.
The public confidence in education institutions will also be harmed by plagiarism if the learner is consistently permitted to take courses and graduate without completing the necessary work.
How to prevent plagiarism?
Avoiding plagiarism starts by judging and showing great care in research analysis and note-taking. Keep a detailed and comprehensive list of all the references that you find through your study and you want to use them in your text.
You must compare each source to the details you write from it so that you can double-check your work and not be recognized as plagiarized content.
The main idea of your research will depend on the data you collected, the wording you use, and the sentences you put in your research.
All these aspects need to be clear and organized to help you understand what your findings are and what interpretations you can make from them.
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Proper citation technique
All learners must mark sources appropriately with proper citations technique. Endnotes or Kind References discourage plagiarism to a greater extent.
They must make a page of Bibliography, Sources, or Referenced work and put it at the end of the study paper to list the sources used in their paper.
There are generally three formats in which sources are recorded that are footnotes, endnotes, and parenthetical references.
Among all, parenthetical references are also known as parenthetical or parenthetical citations and it is most easy to use.
The main thing is to consult with your teacher if you are unsure how you use a certain reference.
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Write your thoughts to be unique
It is not a smart idea either to take an idea from your partner or the collection of a senior student.
To compose something new and original, you are not supposed to use the original text of another person from the web, magazine, or journal.
When you are researching a certain manner, you are already doing some work that has been done by someone else years ago.
But you have to write a new research paper or thesis by your name and you just cannot use some other research paper and use it explicitly in your article without paraphrasing it.
Remember, paraphrasing saves you from plagiarism or combination of sentences from multiple sources, and patchwriting.
Therefore, you must not depend all upon the paraphrasing tool. Double-check your paper with a good plagiarism checker before submitting it.
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Do not endanger yourself
Now you know that it is an unethical, dishonest way to complete your paper and in the end, you will learn nothing.
Moreover, your teacher undoubtedly knows you and your writing style too well so, you cannot confidently send him some copied text.
Plagiarism is getting more frequent with the widespread use of the Internet in most high schools, colleges, and universities.
For students, technology made it too easy as we have mentioned above, to use paraphrasing tools or plagiarism checkers to analyze your paper before submitting it to the teacher.
If you don’t do that, the consequences can be serious because it is no difficult for a teacher to check if you have copied from the published work of another student, so it is best to prevent it.
Use a plagiarism checker
So now you understand how simple it is to eliminate plagiarism. Still, if you are unsure of what you learn, you need not recall it all. How do you know you have correctly quoted your source or used link references?
There are a range of free plagiarism checker as well as paid tools that are available online for you to validate the uniqueness of your article.
Each application will scan your writing and perform a plagiarism test to ensure that your work is original or correctly referenced.
