One of the best ways to show your knowledge and express your thoughts is in the written form. Students complete essays in the universities, scientists publish books and journalists write their articles. But here we have a problem of plagiarism and this issue is becoming more and more important in modern society. So what is plagiarism and what are the reasons?
Plagiarism means using someone`s words, ideas or statements as your own without citing them properly. Basically while writing an essay or an article, the citations were not used. That is why it is actually cheating. Each writer has a right for intellectual property. When someone is using his ideas or words from the book, it is equal to stealing. Of course it doesn`t mean that it is forbidden to use any sources in your own writing. The idea is that each quotation should be cited properly (Marsh, 2007).
As it was mentioned before we may face plagiarism in any sphere of life. In most cases plagiarism may be explained by the fear to show one`s own thoughts. Sometimes a writer just cannot invent anything brilliant or new and uses other`s ideas as his own. However it is not right for a couple of reasons. First of all this is unethical. From the moral point of view stealing someone`s property even if it is intellectual properly makes you a cheater. So it is actually the breaking of law. Secondly, any writing is aimed at developing imagination and improves writing skills. Any person is talented and writing may show all skills. Any type of work leads to self-development and brainstorming. That is why it is always better to find your own ideas and choose your own words to express yourself. And thirdly, plagiarism means that a person didn’t remember anything and didn`t require any new skills. Today almost all schools and universities check each paper carefully for plagiarism. It means that the cheating will be discovered and the reputation will be spoils. Using all the reasons, it is always better to avoid plagiarism.
However plagiarism doesn`t mean that you cannot use sources in your paper. There are such types of papers that cannot be written on your own, for example research paper usually contains 80-90% of sources. The same situation is with the analytical paper. Also sometimes we need to refer to the definition (Lathrop, 2000). Of course books and articles are published so that others could use them while studying. But the main point is to use these sources properly. We may use famous works as examples for better understanding. Also scientific works are aimed at teaching us. There are a couple of ways to avoid plagiarism. It includes citing and quotation. Citation always presupposes the reference page or the work cited page which depends on the format of the paper. It means that we may refer to other`s ideas but specify who is the author of it. Quotation, for example, is the direct word by word saying in quotation marks. Citation as well as quotation can be taken not only from books but also from online sources. Usually a regular essay should not contain more than 10% of quotations.
I think that the best way to avoid plagiarism is to read the book and understand the main idea of it and write the paper by yourself. During the whole life we are studying and let us not find the easiest ways to acquire the knowledge. Only through hard work we are reaching the best results.
References
- Marsh B. (2007). Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education. NY: State University of New York
- Lathrop A., Foss K. (2000) Student cheating and plagiarism in the Internet. Era.Englewood: Libraries Unlimited.
