Hopefully, you do not need an extensive explanation how plagiarism can harm your academic record, reputation, and you fully realize the negative consequences of plagiarizing. On the other hand, not everybody knows how to avoid plagiarism, so this should become the key issue of our discussion.
Here are some ways to avoid plagiarism:
- You need to paraphrase in order to avoid plagiarism. However, finding some synonyms and replacing the original text with them is not a good way out. You need to use your own words and even your own ideas to explain what the original author meant, disclosing his/her main idea.
- You should take advantage of the quotation marks. If you have to use exact words of this particular author, simply put them in quotation marks and cite according to the required style. This is an easy solution to your problem. However, if you use too many quotations, your paper will make a bad impression.
- Thus, another way to avoid plagiarism is to cite your sources. Different writing styles set different requirements for citing sources, but you usually need to mention the name of the author, date of publication, and title of the used source.
- Finally, you should not avoid using plagiarism software, since this way you can make sure that your paper is non-plagiarized.
If you have some other ideas on how you can avoid plagiarism – go ahead and share your thoughts. However, if you do not intend to plagiarize, the percentage of unintended plagiarism remains to be very low.