Revision Practice
Academic papers should be prepared and written to meet at least all the requirements for any academic paper. The first sight on the paper indicates that the paper was not formatted according to the latest APA writing and referencing style. It should be a double spaced, Times New Roman or Arial and with a font size of twelve. In addition, there must be supporting documentation for the paper, which in this case should have been an in-text citation. This provides the evidence for big statements taken or quoted from other materials. At the end of the paper, there must be a reference page in which the original sources of all the work used for this paper should be acknowledged in a list, and which should show the writer, the title of work, the year of publication, the publisher and place of publication.
The correct use of in text citations in APA should have been followed. The APA format requires that the author of any quoted work be acknowledged at the end of the sentence with the information obtained from the work. This should be the surname of the writer followed by the year of publication and separated by a comma. In this paper, the title page was not provided. The APA writing style requires that the writer provide with a clear title page in which he or she should clearly indicate the title of the work, the his or her full name and the institutional he or she is affiliated to.
The entire academic paper should be paginated, where the page numbers should be inserted so as to appear on the upper right hand end of the paper and in roman numbers. Since this paper was supposed to be in APA format, it should also have a running head which is the full title of the paper or its short title. This must appear on the rights upper hand side of the paper. In addition, the first page should have the words ‘running head’ inserted before the title on the header of the paper. The header in all the pages of the academic paper should be in upper case and take the font size and type of the entire paper. The second page is the first page of the text, and should start with a title of the paper. This should not be italicized or bolded, but each world could be capitalized. It should also be center aligned.
The first paragraph should contain the introduction of the entire paper, where the writer should provide the clear information on what the paper is all about. Paragraphs must communicate with each succeeding one in order to provide a good flow of the information contained in the paper. Each paragraph should contain an idea or related ideas, rather than mixing up points. The grammar used to write the paper should be of high quality.
The use of colloquial expression and other English jargons should be avoided. The word lots, therefore, should be replaced with ‘many’ or ‘much’. In the paper, it should be noted that short forms are not allowed in academic writing, and thus the possessive noun ‘it’s’ should be changed to its normal possessive form ‘it is’. The use of comas, periods, quotation marks and others should be observed. In academic papers, the use of first person such as ‘I’, ‘we’,’ and ‘you’ should be replaced with third person noun such as ‘them’, it’, ‘one’, ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘they’. Finally there must be a conclusion paragraph which wraps up the ideas within the entire paper in a rather short summary of words. It should be brief and to the point.
Plagiarism is a very serious form of academic dishonesty in which the writer uses the work of another writer by copying, quoting or referring to it without acknowledging the original writer. The original writer could be a person, organization or web page writers. One must acknowledge the owner of any work used in academic papers as described above in order to avoid plagiarism.
In addition, the work cited should not be quoted directly; rather one must paraphrase the words and sentences. Paraphrasing makes the academic paper have originality, which is the ultimate requirement of most academic institutions. If in any case the writer decides to quote some words, sentences or a whole paragraph from the original work, then he or she must put the quoted work in quoted form, and it is also required that in case of a whole paragraph, there must be paraphrasing.
In addition, the quoted work in such a case must exist in its own paragraph, and indented one inch in order to show the readers what has been borrowed from another source. Finally, the end of the quoted work must have an in-text citation in brackets. Plagiarism checker aids the students to find out which areas of their paper are taken from other sources, and thus paraphrase them or provide in-text citations.
