How to Avoid Plagiarism

Understand the concept of plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined in the American Heritage dictionary as follows: “Plagging is the unauthorized use or excessive copying of another person’s words or ideas as one’s own”. ^[2] Therefore, plagiarism is not simply copying the exact same words, but also including the meaning of the whole work. It is not possible to use the excuse that it is a synonym or a wordless similarity to justify plagiarism. You should take it seriously by writing in your own words and then citing the sources you have consulted. To help yourself write a good paragraph that is not too literal compared to the original (like “calve” the original into your own), instead of copying what you have read from the original, try Think about the meanings contained in the sentences to see what they reflect.

• Original : “The law in this country forbade slaves to receive remuneration from their masters even for the most heinous crimes.”
  • Plagiarism : “The law in this country forbade slaves from receiving compensation from their masters for even the most heinous crimes.”
  • No plagiarism : “Under U.S. law at this time, even if slaves were injured, tortured, or ridiculed, they had no right to receive remuneration from their masters (Jefferson, 157). ).”
• The following cases are also considered plagiarism: ^[3]
  • Download a newspaper online.
  • Hire someone else to write the article.
  • Intentionally turning someone else’s idea into your own.

Thoroughly research the issue you are talking about. When you have a good understanding of certain things and events, you will be able to write about them in your own style instead of taking knowledge from others. Find out information about your topic from books or online, either way, books still have more exclusive, accurate information than the Internet.

• One trick is to consult information from a variety of sources to reduce the chance of plagiarism. For example, when researching slavery, if you rely solely on one book about it, you are more likely to accidentally copy or plagiarize than if you refer to three books. different but with the same subject, that can also include one document and two originals.

Repeat it many times in different ways. It is important that you clearly understand what the reference is referring to and be able to express the meaning contained within in your own style. Avoid just referencing one author’s material as much as you can, because then you will tend to repeat the same author’s style.

• Original : “The slaves had to work hard for 12 hours a day, from early morning until late at night, but they were given only 1200 calories of starch and they had to work on blood and sweat as well. like my tears.”
  • Rewrite : “Despite being provided with only a meager amount of calories, about half the calories we are now recommended to take in, the 19th century slaves had to do it. working in harsh conditions as well as working overtime (Jefferson, 88)”
  • Rewrite : “In the 19th century, slaves had to work until dark but were not provided with adequate nutrition (Jefferson, 88).

Cite the text and the source of the article. You need to cite a reference or citation in your article. If you quote verbatim passages from another author’s work, you must enclose them in quotation marks and quote properly. Most teachers accept citation according to Modern Language Association (MLA) standards, unless otherwise specified.

• You can avoid unintended plagiarism by inserting quotation marks (in the case of a real quote), so that the source of the quote will appear as soon as you type a quote or a sentence like in the original quote. You should insert quotation marks as soon as you start working because if you do it until the last step, you may miss a sentence or a quote and lead to problems with plagiarism.
  

  

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When in doubt, name the author of the idea. There are many ways to help you avoid plagiarism, for example:

• Refer to the original in your own expression, e.g., “According to Richard Feynman, it is possible to use the integral formula to describe electrodynamics”.
• Place quotation marks around a particular phrase to indicate that you have copied the phrase, for example: “A ‘systemic shift’ occurs when a scientific revolution occurs that changes our thinking. people think about the world in a completely different way”.

Understand some basic knowledge about copyright issues. The consequences of plagiarism can not only stop at the creation of a low-quality academic text, but can also become a violation of the law, specifically copyright infringement. You need to know the following to not violate copyright law:

• The facts, the obvious is not copyrighted. This means that you can use any fact to support your article. ^[4]
• Although truth is not the subject of copyright, words used to express truth are copyrighted, especially in respect of original words or special, distinct words (copyright includes distinct expression). You are free to use information from other materials to support your writing as long as you express them in your own words. To avoid copyright infringement, you can use your own words to rephrase the facts. There is an exception in how different the terms are; just adding a comma is not enough to consider it a change to your writing. However, change the grammar structure. ^[5]