How to Ensure That Your Document Is Plagiarism-Free?
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Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that is strictly prohibited by every university. According to their rules and regulations, a student cannot use someone else’s work as his own. If that happens, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the student involved in such activities are penalised according to the extent of their plagiarism. Thus, it is important to develop and maintain academic integrity while also communicating its importance in the community. This offense applies to every student studying in the university, whether a fresher or in the last year of the college. Just as stealing is an offense, the same way, stealing someone else’s ideas and presenting them as your own is also an academic misconduct. The consequences can vary from nominal damage to serious punishments. You may get an F (fail) in that subject or assignment. A serious penalty could include suspension, and in a rare case, expulsion from the university.
Ensuring That You are Submitting a Plagiarism-Free Document
The first step to not get in trouble is to produce your work carefully and ethically. You need to take care of a lot of things – from the tiniest to the most visible ones. Below are three tips that you can use to ensure that your work is completely authentic and clean:
- Proper use of quotations and indentation: Many students do not know the importance of these two terms. A quotation is the use of quotation marks to identify which line is an argument of another owner. Indentation is used in the case of long paragraphs. Make sure that you apply them to your text if it contains content that is borrowed from another author.
- Citation: It refers to identifying those texts in your content which do not belong to you and have been picked from some other sources. You need to cite your outsourced text. It could be a reference to a book, article or journal on the internet. But make sure that your citation is done as per the guidelines of your university.
- Paraphrasing: It may seem to be an easy task, but it could get you in trouble if not done in an appropriate manner. Paraphrasing is the process of writing a piece of content in your own words. The most effective way of doing it without getting caught is to carefully summarising the content and then using it in your idea. Doing this, you might lose the length of that content but most importantly, you can easily avoid plagiarism.
And of course, there are hundreds of online software that you can use to inspect the authenticity of your work. The Turnitin or Copyscape report which you submit along with your document in college is also a strong support to your document’s originality. Other than that, you can also use online services which perform all sorts of quality-inspections such as, proofreading, editing and authenticity check-up.