The Biggest Misconceptions About PlagiarismCollege students ought to at all times watch out to keep away from plagiarism when writing time period papers and essays. There are extreme educational penalties for college students caught plagiarizing even a portion of their time period paper – most will routinely obtain a failing grade, and in lots of instances the coed will probably be expelled from college completely.
The explanation why plagiarism is handled so significantly by academics, professors, and college directors is that plagiarism is taken into account a type of dishonest. By copying one other individual’s phrases or concepts with out citing the supply, not solely are you failing to offer correct credit score to the writer, however you’re passing the work off as your personal. You falsely signify to the reader of your essay (ex. your professor) that you just got here up with the phrases and concepts by your self. That is no completely different than copying an examination reply off a classmate and pretending that you just arrived on the reply your self.
Actively remembering to quote your sources of data and recognizing the results for not doing so will assist forestall deliberate instances of plagiarism. Nevertheless, even well-intentioned college students can get in hassle by failing to know what constitutes as plagiarism and what doesn’t.
The most important false impression about plagiarism is that you just solely have to cite a supply once you’ve immediately copied the phrases of that supply – for instance when you copied a sentence word-for-word from a guide into your time period paper. These college students mistakenly suppose that when you change the phrases of the sentence or put the writer’s concepts in your personal phrases, it’s not essential to cite the supply. This isn’t true!
College students should present a quotation each time info from one other supply is used of their essay, even when the unique phrases had been modified. Plagiarism counts not solely once you borrow different folks’s phrases, but additionally once you borrow their ideas or concepts. Due to this fact, paraphrasing shouldn’t be an alternative choice to quotation. Neither is summarizing. The one time you should use info with out attribution or credit score is when the knowledge is taken into account frequent data – one thing that’s typically accepted as a truth or may be simply present in reference supplies.
Listed here are another myths about plagiarism:
Plagiarism solely counts if many of the analysis paper was plagiarized. FALSE: Even when just one phrase or sentence within the essay was copied with out attribution, it’s nonetheless thought of plagiarism. It’s simple to get away with plagiarism as a result of it’s so laborious to detect and show.
FALSE: Not solely are academics and professors consultants of their subject material and subsequently prone to be conversant in the supply you’re plagiarizing, however educators are more and more utilizing Web instruments that may routinely detect even minor instances of plagiarism.
Remembering these misconceptions will allow you to keep away from unintentional plagiarism in your subsequent essay or time period paper.