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Plagiarism is considered serious academic misconduct. It can cause a student to fail a class, get suspended, or even get expelled from school. But while students are aware that plagiarism is an offense, many still struggle with avoiding it and eventually end up committing accidental plagiarism. Unfortunately, the punishment for accidental plagiarism is often as severe as the punishment for deliberate plagiarism.
So how do you avoid plagiarism? What steps can you take to ensure your paper is original? In this post, we will look at what plagiarism is and what you can do to avoid it. If you recognize what plagiarism is and know how to get around it, you’ll be more likely to produce original output.
What Is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism can be simply defined as passing off someone else’s work as your own. In the academic setting, plagiarism happens when a student submits a written project, such as an essay or research paper, written by someone else. This is considered cheating since students are expected to write their own unique papers. An example of this is when a student copies another student’s paper or takes a paper published on the Internet and then submits it as his or her own.
Types of Plagiarism
While plagiarism is the act of taking other people’s work and passing it as one’s own, it comes in different forms. Knowing the types of plagiarism will help you avoid them. Below are the most common types of plagiarism and their descriptions.
Direct plagiarism. Direct plagiarism is when a student copies another person’s work and submits it without making any changes. An example of this is copying sentences, paragraphs, or even entire sections from a source without enclosing them in quotation marks or citing the source’s author. Hence, the student ends up submitting a paper that is fully or partially identical to others’ works. This type of plagiarism is also known as “copy and paste” plagiarism.
Remix plagiarism. Remix plagiarism is when a student takes content from the source and changes the wording without citing the authors. For instance, the student might paraphrase or summarize the content, which enables the student to avoid submitting an identical copy. But the fact that the student took content from sources without crediting them makes the paper basically plagiarized.
Mosaic plagiarism. This type of plagiarism happens when a student combines content from different sources and then makes limited changes. For example, the student might replace some words with synonyms, change the structure of sentences, rearrange parts, and add or omit words and phrases. The paper thus ends up being a patchwork of stolen and original content.
Self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is basically the act of submitting your own work that you have previously used for a different project. An example of this is submitting an essay to your professor when that essay was submitted to another professor in the previous term.
Misattribution plagiarism. This type of plagiarism happens when a student attributes information to the wrong source. For instance, suppose a piece of information you mention comes from your textbook. But then you cite a journal article as the …….
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