What can you do to keep from plagiarizing?

Answer 1

How do you know if you plagiarized someone's work? Or how do you know if you have committed plagiarism? The easiest way to find out if you plagiarized a work is to put the original words side by side with what you wrote yourself. How many of the words are truly YOURS? How many of your words just repeat what the other person wrote?

Your writing should be:

• your own original thoughts
• held together with well-thought-out points (ingredients)
• seasoned with short points that others made
• peppered with a quoted definition, here and there
• carefully combined, tossed, mixed, until it holds together well (like making a meal)
• presented with correct grammar and punctuation
• served with some level of your interest or passion
• consumed (read) by an audience who ends up interested, entertained, educated (filled up) by what YOU have written

Your writing should NOT:

• simply repeat what someone else said
• repeat what someone else thinks/thought
• paraphrase in such a way that makes it too similar to the original
• take (lift) sentences or paragraphs from something someone else wrote
• use someone else's work without crediting that person
• be dishonest in any way

Answer 2

If you think something has been plagiarized from the web, do a Google search. Feed suspicious looking sentences or phrases into Google - for example, bits that sound too polished ... If you suspect plagiarism from printed material, it is usually more difficult to tell.

Answer 3

Paraphrase

This is the complaint of Every English student who ever wrote a paper. How do I write down somebody else's thoughts without quoting them? The answer is that you can't; even if you paraphrase, you still have to cite the work and author where you got the referrence.

However, what most students don't know is that there is a Lot that doesn't need quotes. Anything that is, or should be, common knowledge doesn't have to be cited, even if you didn't know the information before you learned it in a particular book. This includes a whole range of things:

Birth dates, places, and inventions; general information, even if you didn't know it before you read it - Slavery existed in most parts of the world until as late as the mid 1800s, and is still practiced today in many places, including much of Africa; Astronomers have known for years that moons are common in the Solar System, etc.

Even when you use information from a source, if it is common knowlege, or general information, you can simply include the author of the book in the sentence: As de Toqueville noted about Americans, they are a restless people, never completely satisfied until they see over that next mountain. No quote needed, just include the author in the sentence. When you do this, however, you still need to cite the book in the Bibliography.

When quotes are required: when you use somebody else's exact words. When a citation is needed: when you use information which you got from them and is Not generally known. Example: During the 16th and 17th centuries more than 100,000 women were murdered in Witch hunts. (religioustolerance.com). During the 18th century, over a million Irish (or German, or Italian, or Eastern Europeans) immigrated to the United Sates (U.S. Census Bureau).

Of course, the whole Purpose of a paper is to discover what You think about a subject. You can write any idea you get, even if somebody in a book somewhere wrote pretty much the same thing, without either quotes or citations, and even when (as is usually the case) reading some books or websites Gave you the idea. For instance, in reading several sources, you discover that one of the biggest causes of the Great Depression was farming practices that robed much of the Midwest U.S. and Canada of topsoil. Although you must cite the information you got, usually with just a parenthasized notation (U.S. Agricultural Studies, 1930-1940) you can write any Conclusion that you come to from this information - even if it's included in some of the reading. Better farming techniques were needed before the land was able to support crops again.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

There are pieces of software and websites that they use to plug in fragments of your paper, and they can trace them back to other works.

Answer 5

If you are using something someone else said or you are taking facts from someone or a piece of text and not giving them credit for it.