24houressay.co.uk | Essay Tips: Plagiarism

What is Plagiarism, and how can you avoid it?

by 24houressay's Peter Dodds

Plagiarism is by far the most serious academic sin you can commit, and the consequences can be disastrous. Many universities will fail you instantly, and some will even refuse to give you a second chance. Ultimately, plagiarism is a breach of the ethical code by which academics judge the veracity and authenticity of each other's work, and by committing that breach you are showing that you have no respect for the most basic truths of academic life. Put simply, if you're caught committing plagiarism, your tutor will no longer be able to trust anything you write.

How to avoid plagiarism!

One of the questions we're most frequently asked is: how can I make sure that my paper is 100% original? The answer is simple: use Turnitin!

Turnitin is the industry's leading plagiarism scanner. If your university or college uses a plagiarism scanner, it's almost certainly Turnitin.

Recently, Turnitin launched Turnitin Writecheck, a plagiarism scanner designed for students. The key advantage is that this system doesn't store a copy of your work.

The downside is that you have to pay to use Writecheck. However, the price is very low, and it's worth every penny! That's why we only recommend using Writecheck!

So what is Plagiarism?

Put simply, it's the act of taking someone else's work and passing it off as your own. For example, if you wrote an essay on plagiarism and included a part of my introduction to this article without saying that I wrote it, and making it seem that you wrote it, that would be plagiarism. However, if you included my text but properly referenced it (we'll come to referencing later), that would be fine, since it would be clear to the reader that I wrote it and that you were merely quoting me.

Why is Plagiarism So Important?

Plagiarism is important because academic study needs to show how ideas have developed as they've moved from one writer to another. For example, you need to see that Person A came up with this idea, that Person B developed it to this point, and that now you're continuing that development in order to reach a new point. This allows the reader to immediately contextualise the new work that you're presenting, and to see it as part of a continuing academic narrative. Furthermore, plagiarism is cheating, and means that you're taking credit for someone else's hard work. Put it like this: how would you feel if you wrote an essay, only to later find that a friend of yours had taken that essay, put his or her name on it, and sold it to a company that published academic journals. In other words, your friend made money from your hard work. Obviously plagiarism doesn't have to involve money changing hands, but the point is clear.

Accidental Plagiarism

Plagiarism can be accidental, although there are safeguards you should take that will ensure that this doesn't happen. When you're making notes, for example, always clearly put references for any direct quotes that you write down. Otherwise, you might forget later that these were quotes and you might then write then in your essay as if you came up with them. Tutors are usually extremely sceptical if you then try to explain that you didn't realise you'd committed plagiarism, and in many cases they simply won't believe you, so always reference quotes that you note down during your research. Also, imagine you're reading back through your notes from a particular book and you find a quote but you haven't put where in the book you find it; in order to use that quote with proper referencing, you'll have to go through the whole book again to find it!

How Do Universities Detect Plagiarism?

There are a number of methods that universities use to check for plagiarism. As a university lecturer myself, I've noticed that in the past ten years the number of cases of plagiarism has rocketed, with the result that I now have to actively spend a small part of my marking time checking for plagiarism - this is something I never imagined I'd have to do! I'm not going to give you tips on how to sneak plagiarism into your work and get away with it, partly because I hope you won't do that and partly because there really is no guaranteed way to get around the system. However, I am going to run through the methods that universities use.

First, and most obviously, there is electronic plagiarism detection. The simplest form of this involves pasting small sections of your work into Google and seeing if it can be found on the internet. This is the simplest form of plagiarism and also the dumbest. If you include material copied and pasted from a website in your essay and don't attribute it, you will almost certainly get caught. Try copying and pasting a sentence from this article, and you'll see that Google has indexed it and any tutor would immediately be able to see where the text came from.

Turnitin - The Most Popular Anti-Plagiarism Software

As noted earlier, Turnitin is a sophisticated essay database that checks your essay against hundreds of thousands of other submitted essays. Turnitin gives your essay a score out of 100, and if your essay scores over 10 then there's a real chance that your tutor will start investigating your work for plagiarism. Obviously there will always be some text that has been duplicated, since other students will have used the same quotes as you, and a score of more than 10 might simply mean that you've used a few too many quotes, even if they are properly attributed: this does not count as plagiarism. As a general rule, if your essay is more than 10% quoted material, this is a little too much, and you should aim for no more than around 7.5%.

The other thing to remember is that your university tutors are experts in their subject, which means that they have a very good understanding of the majority of the sources that are available to you; they'll certainly have more than a passing familiarity with all the texts in your university library, for example, so they'll have developed a good second sense when it comes to passages that have been plagiarised. In other words, they'll be able to guess if there's plagiarism, even though it might then take them a little while to track down the source so they can prove it. This idea of a kind of second sense is something I've mentioned a number of times in these articles, and although it might sound a little esoteric, it's a genuine factor in both yours and your tutor's working life.

Plagiarism and Essay Writing Sites

Of course, plagiarism is a big worry if you're buying an essay from the internet, and this is where you have to be very careful. Many essay writing sites (not this one) use large essay banks, which are databases of essays covering many subjects. Sites that make a small payment get access to these banks and can then alter the essay so that it vaguely suits your subject - or in some cases, they won't even do that, beyond perhaps making a few changes using the 'Find and Replace' function in MS Word. These essays are almost always going to fail, and it's almost certain that they'll get you into trouble for plagiarism since so many other students will have bought exactly the same essay. The best option is always to write the essay yourself, and I hope these guides are helpful in that regard, but if you do need to buy an essay then you should at least make sure the site you use is one that genuinely offers custom writing by experienced writers. 24houressay.co.uk is one of a small number of sites that offer this service. A simple Google search, coupled with some research of your own, will help you get an idea of which sites you can trust, and which you can't!

Plagiarism - Avoid at all Costs!

Clearly, plagiarism is a very big danger when you're writing academic essays, and it's easy to accidentally include some in your essay either on purpose or accidentally. The internet has made it much easier to find material to plagiarise, but it's also made it much easier to detect, and the best option is to either write the essay yourself or to find an essay writing service that guarantees not to use plagiarism. Fundamentally, plagiarism rules are a way of ring-fencing academic debates and arguments in such a way as to retain a high degree of contextual understanding in terms of where those arguments come from and how the relevant ideas have developed over the years. This might not sound particularly important, but the development of an idea can allow it to be traced over a number of years, which can really help when it comes to going back and looking at possible mistakes. As an academic and a lecturer, I find it vital and fascinating to be able to go back and look at the origin of an idea, and to perhaps spot missed opportunities in the argumentative development of that idea. To lose that possibility, amid a wave of plagiarism, would be a real shame, and I hope this guide will help you avoid plagiarism and understand the importance of doing so.

Note: Be very careful if you decide to use a plagiarism scanner other than Turnitin or Turnitin Writecheck. Some disreputable companies set up free scanners that harvest and store a copy of your essay, which the company then sells to other students.

Click here for our look at famous cases of plagiarism.

___________________________________________________________________________

Sitemap | Custom Essays | Custom Dissertations | Cheap Essays | UK Essay Writing Company