Good artists borrow, great artists steal. This is a quote from, presumably, Pablo Picasso. If I wouldn’t mention that, the first sentence of this article would have been considered plagiarism. And people don’t like it when you pose someone else’s idea as your own.
The term plagiarism came to English through Latin from the Greek word plagion – ‘kidnapper’. Kidnapping or stealing something is not ethical and does not help you impress your readers. Especially, when they are your college professors. When you are writing an essay or a mental health blog, you want them to be genuine pieces of content. And the outcome will be happy readers and good college marks. So, let’s take a closer look at how to avoid plagiarism.
Know your enemy
There are various kinds of plagiarism. And if you think that you are safe from this problem, you might fall victim to a variant of plagiarism you didn’t know about. So, here they are:
- Accidental – sometimes you forget to cite a source of your information, and sometimes you don’t even know that the text you wrote is very similar to someone else’s work. This type of plagiarism is accidental, but it bears consequences nevertheless. Use every means to prevent being penalized for it.
- Deliberate – this type is just plain copying of other people’s work for your own benefit. Sometimes the audience can be tricked. And in other cases, the fraud comes to light. You don’t want to put your reputation in danger.
- Mosaic – this type of plagiarism is less overt than the previous one. It’s when you take parts of various intellectual properties of others and stitch them together like patchwork to create a new thing. The thing is not new, though, and is still considered plagiarism.
- Self-plagiarism – this one might sound controversial. But yes, you can steal your own texts and be penalized for that. If you write an article and publish it, you need to carefully cite it as a source if you plan to borrow parts of it for your next written work.
How to be original
Writing genuine texts takes time and effort. That’s why people pay essay writers for the work they do. When I am planning to do my assignment I invest my resources, time, and ideas in it. That is the core of what makes written content original and worthy of readers’ attention.
Writing can be segmented into several stages, not all of which you can fit in that final night before the deadline. By respecting these stages, you will eventually come up with a unique piece of content:
- Research – reading different sources often leads to plagiarism. But you don’t have to quote or copy everything you read. What you’re after are the ideas that would push your own thinking processes and generate new thoughts, which you can safely put into your paper.
- Create a plan – when you have your head filled with all these different amounts of relevant information, it is time to split your work into sections. If you did your research right, you will know the best way to name these paragraphs.
- Fill it with your ideas – after you have read and comprehended various data on the subject and created headings for your paragraphs, you will be able to fill them with genuine thoughts. The information you gathered connects in your head to generate new ideas.
- Cite all sources – borrowing thoughts elsewhere is not a crime if you carefully name every source you draw from. Cite your sources at the end of your academic paper with exact pages where the information was taken from. Usually, your academic establishment should explain to you the right way of formatting these notes.
- Check your text – run it through a grammar checker to catch any and all mistakes. They are almost unavoidable in a big text. And when you catch them all, run your paper through a plagiarism checker. This is how you avoid plagiarism in your essay. And your professors will do it anyways.
When plagiarism happens
Sometimes even an honest writer can stumble into a problem of duplicate content. Plagiarism checkers look not only for identical texts between your works and their database but also for similar flow of thoughts. In the case when your work is slanted for being a duplicate of someone else’s by the program, you have to revise it. Take the highlighted text, paraphrase it, and add some fresh ideas to it.
Conclusions
There were times when duplicating content was a profession in demand. Who knows, how many literary masterpieces we have lost due to accidents just because they didn’t have enough copies to survive through the ages. But with the invention of the printing press and the internet, copying is not that hard anymore. What is more in demand now is to write a genuine piece of text and avoid plagiarism.
