Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism in Your Essay
Plenty of students in high school or campus will attest to their dislike of writing essays. It proves a daunting prospect for not only most of them, but also a time-consuming venture. Despite their feelings towards essays, essays play an instrumental role in determining how their grades score at the end of the semester, term, or academic year. Instructors tend to issue students with essay assignments to test their understanding of the subjects taught. Here, students have to showcase their comprehension by developing their concepts and explaining them to their readers.
However, the current dispensation sees plenty of students developing an unprecedented level of laziness up to a point it becomes impossible to distinguish the fine line between efficiency and laziness. As such, most students will find themselves taking shortcuts by plagiarizing content when presented with writing an essay. Well, as much as they complete their papers in record time, it constitutes a breach of academic expectations and standards and can lead to severe repercussions. But in instances where you come across a brilliant idea, you can always pick it up and write about it, provided you do it in your unique way.
Brilliant Ways of Avoiding Plagiarism
The beauty regarding writing entails expressing yourself in diverse ways, provided you can ponder and analyze concepts. However, you can sometimes fail to recognize that your work involves plagiarism, which can prove costly. So how can you go about it? How can you avoid plagiarism when doing your write-up?
Consider the following to avoid plagiarism:
- Track your research. It becomes crucial to bookmark and take notes of whatever content you come across and intend to use whenever you embark on a research process. It becomes easier to go to your annotated references list for cross-referencing purposes compared to sieving through the text afresh. It can involve pictures, videos, and other forms of media. In this manner, it will become easier to credit sources correctly and adequately.
- Employ proper citations. Your research always comes as an essential piece, but equally, your sources matter a lot as they lay credence to everything you write. Therefore, it becomes critical to use excellent citations and adequately, so that your reader can easily reference the text. It demonstrates your ability to borrow information applicable to your study and using it properly. Any lack of proper citation leads to plagiarized content with devastating effects. Additionally, check the type of citation format you want to use and ensure it gets approved before deploying it in your work.
- Use quotations. Try and use quotes in instances where you cannot explain something better than the source. Here, you take exact words from the source, besides citing the actual quote. Ensure that quotations exist in the text and the right type of quotation gets employed. You can decide to use a block quote or the direct quote depending on your preference and the kind of phrase quoted.
- Paraphrase. You have to learn how to paraphrase, especially when writing essays. Here, you aim at regurgitating every vital information and using your words to express them. It brings out your writing style, which becomes crucial in identifying your identity as a writer.
- Stay original. Try and use initial thoughts to express your concepts. It will help with eliminating plagiarism.
- Try a preferred plagiarism checker to check your content and ensure you eliminate all forms of plagiarism.
- Finally, consult your instructor to get directions with issues that prove unclear.
Conclusion
Zero plagiarism boosts the quality and profiles of your work. So if you want to score high marks on your essays, ensure originality by adhering to the suggested guidelines.
