12 - Plagiarism

Many students nowadays are fond of using internet to search for their assignments or projects. What they did is search for it then copy and paste then pass it.  And this result to some plagiarism. Many people are aware of plagiarism but some didn’t know what it is. Here is the definition of plagiarism and how can we avoid plagiarizing someone’s work.

Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work. In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.

Remember to site your sources. We can also use paraphrasing, but it’s better to understand first what is paraphrasing.  Paraphrasing means taking another person’s ideas and putting those ideas in your own words. Paraphrasing does NOT mean changing a word or two in someone else’s sentence, changing the sentence structure while maintaining the original words, or changing a few words to synonyms. If you are tempted to rearrange a sentence in any of these ways, you are writing too close to the original. That’s plagiarizing, not paraphrasing.

Now that you understand what plagiarism is, you’re ready to employ the following three simple steps to avoid plagiarizing in your written work.

• Step 1: Accentuate the positive. Change your attitude about using citations.
• Step 2: How can I keep track of all this information? Improve your note-taking skills.
• Step 3: So many details, so little time! Locate the appropriate style manual.

Remember don’t you ever plagiarize someone’s work cause it’s an act of fraud that can harm your reputation as a students or a professional worker. Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism. -George A. Moore

REFERENCEShttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgeamo205190.html?src=t_plagiarismhttp://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/plagiarism/