Friday, February 20, 2009

What is Plagiarism and Tips to Preventing

Tips to Preventing

What is Plagiarism and Tips to Preventing Plagiarism



Plagiarism is defined as reproduction of the language and thoughts of another author and representation of them as one's own original work. When people use others thoughts and posing as their own ideas, it is known as the offensive act of plagiarism.

Useful Tips to prevent Plagiarism as follows:

  • Give evidence how you have clear understanding by reading relevant materials.
  • Always give references to your ideas from where and which sources you got your ideas.
  • There should be evaluation of your ideas by comparing ideas of other author
  • Explain the nature of the exercise clearly to students.
  • Specify particular books or websites that must be used as some of the source materials
  • Require the submission of a rough draft.
  • Require an oral presentation on the same topic.
  • Educate students about good note-taking styles.
  • Model good practice in course handouts and other material.
  • Educate about appropriate referencing.
  • Educate about the boundaries of acceptable practice.
  • Stress that writing exercises are not just about the final product but about the skills developed along the way.
  • Carry out some meta-learning activity such as asking students how they found their sources.

Some people always appoint themselves in paraphrasing rather than creative writing. Paraphrasing is a conversion of one's ideas into your own words. Many people will change the entire sentence and words with synonyms and such kind of changes in phraseology is also taken as paraphrasing. If the people are trying to rewrite sentence by changing some words to their synonyms it would be considered as an act of plagiarism.