PLAGIARISM AND HOW TO AVOID IT.

Plagiarism is the intentional copying of another person’s writing, using their words and their ideas and claiming it as one’s own. Plagiarism has also been defined as stealing, an act of fraud and immoral behavior by various authors. It is also defined as To take and use as one’s own (the thoughts, writing or inventions of another person) by the oxford dictionary. One may however use another person’s words and ideas in writing and credit them to that person, in this case that is not considered as plagiarism.

Plagiarism can be avoided in the various ways. The first and the most common manner in which one can avoid plagiarizing is by quoting phrases in their writing that they have obtained from a different author. This applies to information that is not common knowledge; such as a person’s own opinion.

Another way of avoiding plagiarism is by crediting an author either at the beginning of the sentence or bracketed at the end. For instance, According to Forbes magazine, Google’s’ sales for the year 2012 is over 43 billion dollars. One can also write something obtained from a different author and at the end put down their name in brackets, for instance, Google has made a profit of over 11 billion dollars in the year 2012 and sales of over 43 billion dollars (Forbes). These are Forbes’ opinion based on their analysis and not common knowledge.

When obtaining material from a certain source compiled by a different author, plagiarism can be avoided by following different steps from which the author followed. This helps one in preventing the use of another author’s words.

Paraphrasing is also advised in order to avoid plagiarism. It is important to quote even if one is paraphrasing a text. According to Oxford dictionary, paraphrasing is expressing the meaning of something using different words, especially to achieve greater clarity’.

When one includes common knowledge in their write up they are not accused of plagiarism, common knowledge includes history dates such as dates of birth, a country’s independence date and other common facts that are not one’s own opinion.

There is also self plagiarism, which is basically copying from oneself. Self plagiarism refers to the act of presenting one’s own previously published work as though it were new (The American Psychological Association, 2010). It may not necessarily be copying of the whole work but even copying of a portion without following the guidelines to avoid plagiarism would be self plagiarism.

All this acts of plagiarism have consequences although the consequences may differ from one profession to another or from the type of plagiarism. For instance, copying of a lecturer’s work is considered academic plagiarism by students although in most universities there is no penalty for this. There is also plagiarism in journalism which could result in termination of one’s employment because it is a breach to their ethics. Plagiarism can be avoided but with the advanced technology and the internet, it is actually on the rise as people just copy and paste information from one source to another and present it as their own work.