Plagiarism is defined as stealing or copying someone else’s work, ideas, expressions or thoughts and represent it as your own work without giving any credit to the original author. It is considered a serious offense and intellectual theft in the writing world.
Plagiarism can be also be defined as a form of academic dishonesty, academic misconduct, and digital cheating. It has been declared as unacceptable by many universities and also legally, so if the original author sees his work somewhere he can take some legal actions against it.
On the university lever, plagiarism is taken very seriously. If a student copies someone else’s work and submit to the instructor, he would directly get 0 on his work or in some rare cases “F” in the entire course if the instructor is very strict about his rules. In some university if the plagiarism is repeated by a student then he may even get kicked out of the university.
it is against the law but you shouldn’t just avoid it because of that reason alone. You should have personal integrity, original thoughts and scholarly research so that you can easily avoid plagiarism. You should learn to cite the sources and certainly know how to integrate quotations properly so that would help you in avoiding the plagiarism.
Plagiarism can be done unintentionally too so if you think you would never plagiarize someone else’s work then you may be wrong because plagiarism can be caused by your ignorance, negligence or your lack of confidence.
Therefore, even good students sometimes are caught plagiarizing, the reason for that can be his / her last-minute panic, a misunderstanding about what constitutes plagiarism, purposely copying someone else’s work or ideas or citing sources bibliography and not in the paper. Still it considered plagiarism as it no excuse to be ignorant towards someone else’s work.
Paraphrasing is a one way of avoiding plagiarism. Paraphrasing is when you take ideas from someone’s work and use it in your own words by providing only citation but without any quotation marks. In paraphrasing you are allowed to use some of the words from the context but not the entire phrase that would include in plagiarism so that is why you should change it as much as possible.
Some students say that how do they avoid plagiarism if they are given a topic they have no information about, they are bound to search through the internet and copy other people’s work. To answer that students should do some thorough research on the topic and gain all the information they can get, this way they can form an opinion about the topic and avoid plagiarism.
Students nowadays only use google to research on their respective topics which increases the chances of the plagiarism. Students now do not even think about the topic themselves or think about any of the ideas for the topic, they directly go to google and search about what the others have o say about the topic. institutions should encourage the students to trust themselves and think about the topic themselves.
