How to Prevent Plagiarism in Essays, Book Reports, and Web Articles

Plagiarism is unacceptable whether it happens in academic circles or on online websites. In academic circles, you may receive a zero grade or even face expulsion. If you plagiarize in web articles, search engines won’t rank your content, and it will become invisible. Here is more about plagiarism, why it’s unacceptable and how to prevent it.

What is Plagiarism? 

Plagiarism is when you present the work or ideas of another as your own without the consent of the original author or giving the author any acknowledgment. You may not even do this intentionally, but it is still unacceptable.

Why is Plagiarism Cheating?

Professors in academic institutions want to evaluate your original work and not the work of others. Plagiarism is stealing intellectual property. It is unethical because you benefit from someone else’s efforts. The uniqueness of your work is important as a student. The whole point of your assignments is to evaluate your progress. If you present the work of others as your own, it not only shows poor scholarship but defeats the object of learning.

How to Test for Plagiarism

If you want to know how to avoid plagiarism in books, articles and other academic writing, using a plagiarism checker is essential. You may not even realize where you are guilty of plagiarism. The highly popular FixGerald tool for students and teachers is a plagiarism checker that will list any instances where you copy directly from an online source or don’t use quotation marks for a quote. A plagiarism fixer gives you an opportunity to reword content that’s too close to an original source and make it unique.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

When you’re a student and you have to write essays, book reports etc., you need some tips to help you to avoid plagiarism.

• If you have to read books and write book reports, you can’t just use the words of an author to make a point. You must place the words in quotation marks. You also need to include a footnote or an in-text citation to show the source. If you don’t do so, it looks as though the words are yours and not those of the author.

• You can’t use the ideas of others in your essays without proper citation. Your instructors will want to know what ideas you came up with yourself and which ones came from consulting different sources. You must acknowledge all the sources of ideas that aren’t your own.

• If you paraphrase, you need to do so carefully. Just swapping words around is not enough. It is important to present the ideas you found in a source accurately, but you need to describe them in your own language.

As you progress in your studies, you will understand how important it is to use many different sources. You may want to add to existing research you find in scientific literature, such as journal articles. You may argue that existing research is inadequate and discuss why. To do this, you need to be familiar with important research in your field. You will have to refer to many different sources. You will need to cite them correctly using a specific citation style.

About Plagiarism and Citing Sources:  Video Explanation

Prevent Plagiarism in Web Articles

Bloggers and website owners also need to ensure that their articles are 100% original. Search engines rate original content highly. Any instances of plagiarism will result in lower rankings in search engines. If you have a website for a business, this means less organic traffic to it and fewer chances to convert consumers to customers.

Do Not Use AI Tools to Write for You 

There’s nothing wrong with running your essays or research papers through some tools like grammar and spelling checkers or the Hemingway App. This can help you to reduce errors and make your writing clearer. It’s when you use AI tools to write your work for you that it can be a problem. A teacher who knows your writing ability and style is likely to identify that you didn’t write the work but used AI to write it. Educational institutions also now using AI detection tools.  In addition, many AI tools paraphrase existing copy from multiple other websites and this is also a form of plagiarism (cheating), especially if you don’t cite your sources.

Conclusion 

Plagiarism is not acceptable in academic institutions, and the consequences can be severe. You need to avoid it in online articles and on websites, too, because search engines don’t like unoriginal content. Hopefully, the above ways of avoiding plagiarism will help you. You should always check for plagiarism, as you may have done it without realizing it. If you check and find problems, you can still fix them before you hand in a paper or publish an article.