How Do You Avoid Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the wrong kind of recycling!
“How do you avoid plagiarism” is a common question that we receive at Paper Masters. Many students worry that they don’t know enough about plagiarism to even know that they are plagiarizing. Research gives evidence of this as a recently published book by Susan Debra Blum called My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture describes how students often plagiarize and don’t know they are doing it. So how do you avoid plagiarism? At Paper Masters, our standard definition of plagiarism is as follows: Any time you take 5 words or more in a row, from another source, and not cite it, it is plagiarism. There are many types of plagiarism beyond the definition above. Not citing statistical information such as a dollar amount, a percentage or any numerical fact is plagiarism, no matter how many words are “in a row”.
Taking an original idea and calling it your own is plagiarism. With so many different definitions, how does one avoid plagiarizing? To avoid plagiarism, keep two simple rules of thumb in mind: 1) Don’t copy and paste information from anyplace and forget to cite where you got it. As soon as you put a quote from someone else in your research paper, put the citation after it and add it to the works cited page. 2) If the idea you just put in your research paper is something that is common knowledge (something your girlfriend, father, wife etc… would know) than you don’t need to cite it as an original idea of someone else. However, if you state in your paper a fact that is uncommon, cite immediately and save yourself the trouble of having to defend your honor.
Plagiarism is the theft of information and ideas and, while not punishable by imprisonment, as I would like it to be, it is a serious offense. Intellectual property laws govern many types of plagiarism and the notion of stealing ideas needs to be given proper contemplation in legislation.
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