Note: What follows is an article written by a contributing writer, the views expressed here are not those of SciSpace or its employees.
Academic writing isn't an easy task. To create an academic document, students have to read and go through several books, journal articles, and other authentic sources of information to acquire knowledge and cite them in their work. When they do creative work, they still need to quote others who have previously worked in the same or similar domain.
Reading multiple sources while creating an assignment is a great practice that helps students in various ways:
- It enhances their knowledge
- It helps them know what kind of work is already done
- Reading those sources also makes their assignments look more proficient
However, reading the prior work and citing them also create a significant problem for students: plagiarism. It can cost students grades, waste their time & efforts, and in some extreme conditions, it can rusticate them from the institute. That's why students should ensure that their work is always free from plagiarism or that it is below the accepted percentage.
If you want to make sure that your academic assignments are free from plagiarism, this article can help. Let's see how to avoid plagiarism in all of your academic documents!
1. Use your own writing style:
Want to make sure that you borrow an idea from a place and still avoid plagiarism? If yes, develop a unique writing style. It is essential to have different writing styles in academic writing that not many authors use to remove plagiarism. Your own writing style means you know how to use language that does not replicate someone else's work.
With a unique writing style, you enable yourself to pen down your knowledge or thoughts that sound like you, not like someone else.
However, developing a distinctive different writing style is not as easy as it sounds, especially when completing your task within a short deadline. But with some effort, you can develop a different writing style and permanently remove plagiarism.
Below are some tips for how to improve your writing skills:
- Read works of expert authors.
- Learn about your writing strengths and weaknesses.
- Analyze how good authors in your field compile their thoughts.
- Enhance your vocabulary.
- Learn how to state a thing in different ways.
- Practice writing every day.
Apply these tips to enhance your writing style according to the writing style guide.
2. Improve your vocabulary:
A vocabulary is an essential tool in any writing, whether academic, content, or fiction. It helps you understand the subject better and provides a stronger foundation for your work.
Many benefits come with focusing on how to improve vocabulary. One of the most significant advantages of improving vocabulary is that it helps you avoid plagiarism and exude confidence in your academic writing. That's why you must strengthen the language of your field of study. Knowing what terminologies to use and when helps make your paper more authoritative and concise.
Here are some of the best ways to how to improve your vocabulary:
- Read research papers, books, and other materials related to your field.
- Try to understand the meaning and etymology of relevant words.
- Use thesaurus and dictionary while reading or writing any article.
- Learn the synonyms of frequently used words.
3. Get Ideas from Others, Not Words:
When drafting an academic assignment, you should remember that your professors or lecturers want original and meaningful work from you. They also anticipate that you cite various authors to enhance the validity.
When citing other authors, you must read their work and understand what you should do. However, many students merely copy-paste the words. It is a common practice among students but comes at a cost.
The authorities will punish the students if they detect plagiarism in the text. So try to gather other authors' work ideas and write them in your own words. You must ensure that you avoid intentional and unintentional plagiarism.
4. Must Ensure Uniqueness
In the past, students made their assignments plagiarism free by comparing them with other students' work. This practice gave a massive margin to students as they could copy projects from books and claim the work's authenticity. It is essential to check plagiarism before submitting your assignment to avoid penalties from your college or university.
With time, things have changed. Students are bound to ensure uniqueness with the emergence of plagiarism tools. Although they can use direct quotes or cite other scholars, they need to keep plagiarism below a specific limit.
However, a plagiarism checker also helped students in many ways. For example, they can use an online plagiarism detector to ensure that a paper they have compiled is unique.
As a student, when you upload a text into a copyright checker, it will check plagiarism by analyzing its database and using AI to find instances of duplication in that text. Then, it will show you the portions already published anywhere else with their links. Furthermore, they will also tell you about the percentage of plagiarism. That percentage can help you decide whether you should change the plagiarized portions or not.
If the plagiarism is below the allowed level, you don't need to worry about anything, as your academic document is ready to go. However, remember that many plagiarism checkers are available online, but it is always essential to use an authentic one to check plagiarism in your academic projects.
5. Cite Other Authors
When using someone else's work, it is essential to provide proper citations so readers can know where the information came from. If a person's work is not cited, their work will be lost, and they won't be able to receive credit for their ideas. When you mention other authors and openly say that these lines are not yours, you can easily defend yourself in case of accidental plagiarism.
Citation is the practice of crediting your sources to recognize and appreciate their work. It indicates that the idea behind the word you discussed was borrowed from another scholar. When citing sources, you must know what writing style your university, college, or discipline follows. Once you know the style, you can easily quote and cite the sources by passing the plagiarism test. Many institutes allow students to put direct quotes, so if you don't want to put more effort into rephrasing, use direct quotes appropriately.
6. Try Paraphrasing Method
Paraphrasing is a way of summarizing or rewriting the main points of a text in your own words. This is generally used to avoid plagiarism, but it can also be used as a way to make your work more exciting and unique.
It is one of the best ways to avoid plagiarism because it creates a new piece of work that does not include any direct quotes from another source. Furthermore, this allows you to maintain the original author's voice while still ensuring that you are writing about the same topic.
Paraphrasing is not the same as stealing or copying someone else's work. You can accomplish paraphrasing in two different ways. First, manually paraphrase the helping text. Second, get help from a paraphrasing tool online. Manual paraphrasing is a time-consuming task. If you have a short deadline, try using a paraphrasing tool.
A good rephrasing tools that comes with built-in plagiarism remover can quickly paraphrase the whole text. It replaces words and terminologies with contextually relevant and accurate synonyms. Furthermore, these tools also change the entire sentence without modifying the context. That's how a word changer helps students eliminate plagiarism and create a unique copy in no time. However, you need to scrutinize the paraphrased content manually and include them in your work.
To Conclude
Avoiding plagiarism in academic documents is essential for every student. Otherwise, they may face themselves in big trouble. That's why they need to properly compile their assignments and make sure these assignments don't contain any plagiarism. Whether they want to put some additional work into improving their language skills or not, it’s good practice to learn how to avoid plagiarism.
For that purpose, they can utilize the tips mentioned in this article and prepare their academic assignments plagiarism-free.
Author's Bio:
The article is written by Jennifer, a science publisher with close to 10 years of experience. She wants to help students and researchers stay ahead of the trends and developments in the science community by making science more accessible to everyone.
