Avoid Plagiarism in Your Essay

Plagiarism is an act of fraud in the writing world. With the development of the internet plagiarism has become a bigger problem. Many students will cut and paste another’s work into their own essays. Anyone considering altering the text slightly to avoid this charge should be aware that copying the structure of a sentence, even though you may have changed several words, is still considered plagiarism. Teachers are faced with the difficult problem of checking that a student has not copied or partially copied one of the many documents that exist on the internet.

The simplest way of avoiding a charge of plagiarism is to correctly cite the sources for your quotations or other material that you have borrowed from another author. However, if information is considered to be common knowledge then there is no need to cite a source. Another way to avoid plagiarism is, when taking notes from an article, to only record the essential points of an article. In this way when you write up your notes you will be forced to expand on the points in your own words. The advantages of this approach are two-fold, firstly it ensures that you will not repeat word for word the original article and secondly it tests whether you fully understand the points that you are making.

Not all plagiarism is intentional amongst students. There can also be grey areas where it is difficult to decide whether something has been plagiarised or not. PlagiarismChecker.com and Article Checker are two free online tools that will check your essay to ensure that you are not inadvertently plagiarising someone else’s work. And of course, when you are hard at work crafting your own text, WhiteSmoke's grammar software can help you ensure your grammar is accurate. For a quick edit, you can try WhiteSmoke's free online grammar checker and free online dictionary!

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Teach99
Posts: 2

a very real problem
Reply #1 on : Tue March 03, 2009, 15:45:03

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I am a 9th grade English teacher and it's absolutely horribly how prevalent this problem is in today's schools. With the advent of the internet, our students are simply exposed to a world of information addressing any topic imaginable, and the temptation is ubiquitous for acts of plagiarism. Let this post serve as a reminder to all of your users that plagiarism is a serious offense and can carry pretty serious consequences especially if committed within a university setting.