One of the serious academic crimes that a student can commit is to submit a plagiarized assignment. First, let’s start by defining plagiarism. Plagiarism is the act of copying other writers’ content, ideas or writings without providing the appropriate citation. Education institutions treat plagiarism as cheating or dishonest, and it can lead to discontinuity of a student from the course, partially or totally suspension from the institution, marks deduction among other penalties in as prescribed on the school policies and regulations.
This, however, does not mean that the students should not use other writers’ materials when researching for their paper. Actually, for a college research paper, you must provide credible and reliable information to support your argument. Thus you must use other writers’ ideas to reinforce or back your points. However, instead of copying direct what others have written, you can use some of the following techniques to back your idea without plagiarizing. Here are the techniques to use,
- Citation
Citing is the providing the readers with the source where you obtained the information you have used on the research paper. Citing is among the simplest way of avoiding submitting a plagiarized paper. There are many resources such as books, online journals, websites, magazines, blogs among others where you can obtain information, data and evidence to support our opinion. Many of these resources are published by different authors, and therefore it is essential to cite them because it shows the credibility of the information.
You should also ensure that you have cited your paper using the specified style by your lecturer for different institutions and disciplines requires a specific style of citation. There are two forms of citation that you must indicate on your paper, and they include; the in-text citation that appears at the end of a sentence that you have cited. Also, references or the work cited which contain the source bibliography and appear on the last page of your text.
- Quotation
Quoting is also an efficient mechanism of avoiding plagiarism, and it involves directly writing what the other author has written. Similar to the citation you must indicate that the words or idea you have used belongs to another writer. A common way of quoting is by using quotation marks.
Also, you can include a quote in your paper by justifying the quotation differently from the text or by minimizing the font from the rest of the text. However, quotation differs from the citation for you are limited from paraphrasing with your own words. Paraphrasing a quote can distort the meaning or change the original idea thus you must be careful from making such a mistake.
- Summarizing
Another effective way of minimizing your chances of submitting a plagiarized college paper is by summarizing what you have read from the research sources using your own words. This means shortening the ideas or writings using your words without changing the meaning. However, you to avoid being penalized for plagiarism you must cite the author of the original idea that you have used for your paper.
Due to limited time provided for writing an assignment, you may make plagiarism mistake indelibility, and this can cost you a fail. Therefore, instead of risking your academic endeavours you can seek help from a professional writer or an academic writing company offering writing services. You can also check online for free essay writing samples and learn how to apply the mechanisms to avoid writing plagiarized papers. These companies can help each and every student to score high and finish all the tasks on time.
