5 Ways to Avoid Plagiarism in Academic Writing
Academic writing is the formal type of writing that is used in universities and scholarly publications. It is commonly used in writing journal articles, books, essays, or any academic topic.
It is a challenging task to write an academic paper or assignment. There is always a need to do research, read books, articles, and other relevant information to gather the information and use them in their work.
But sometimes, students use to gather information in their papers without any reference, which leads to plagiarism. It occurs when someone copies others' data or content and uses it as their own without giving any reference.
Plagiarism is the worst issue that can even destroy a student's career. If the institute detects plagiarism that is more than 15%, then they can even fail you, can expel you, or even revoked your degree.
If you are looking for a way that can help to avoid plagiarism in your academic papers, then this post will help you. Here we will talk about five effective ways that can help every student to avoid plagiarism in any academic writing.
Let's started.
5 Effective Ways That Can Help Students to Avoid Plagiarism
As we have discussed earlier, what is plagiarism, and how can it affect the student's profession? Here are a few tips that can help you to avoid it. The first tip is:
1. Gather the Information from Various Sources
The first tip that you have to follow is to gather information from different sources. Whether you are writing any academic essay, assignment, research paper, or article, research is the most crucial part.
Why is research important in academic writing? The research allows you to gain knowledge and expertise on a topic of your choice or that is assigned to you. It is also important because it helps you to gather some evidence and stats regarding your topic.
Furthermore, you might be wondering why there is a need to collect data from various sources. Let us explain this to you.
Doing research and collecting information from different sources can help you to avoid plagiarism. Whenever you choose to collect data from a few sources, then there are chances of similarity occurring in your paper while writing and also the risk of plagiarism.
That's why you must expand your research and gather data from online sources. You can use online sources like Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Google Books, Science.gov, Library of Congress, etc.
Other than that, make sure to do research on each part of the topic, like if you are using headings H2s, then try to do separate research on it. This is how you'll be able to avoid plagiarism.
Paraphrase Your Write-Ups
Paraphrasing is another helpful way that can help students to avoid plagiarism in their papers. Paraphrasing is the process in which we present someone else thoughts or ideas by altering the words, which doesn’t change its intent.
You can paraphrase your content by doing some steps, which are:
- Replace some words with their synonyms
- Change sentences from active to passive voice and vice versa
- Rephrase the paragraphs and sentences into different words
If you want to paraphrase your academic writing manually, then you can follow the above steps. But if you don't have time to paraphrase your content on your own, then you can also opt to paraphrase by using online tools.
There are hundreds of online paraphrasing tools available on the internet that help students and writers to effectively paraphrase their content.
Furthermore, you need to be careful in choosing a good paraphrasing tool because every tool doesn't perform well. Some modern tools use highly advanced artificial intelligence (AI) based technology.
So, if you want to paraphrase your content through online tools, then choose the best one. If you don't know which tools are good, here are some of them according to our research:
- Paraphrasing tool (check-plagiarism)
- Quillbot
- WordTune
You can choose any one of them to paraphrase your content. They will help you to avoid plagiarism in your academic writing.
Add Citation & Quotation Properly
As we have discussed above that, using others' content in papers leads to plagiarism. But you can also cite or quote the real author, which will avoid plagiarism in your writing.
The quotation is defined as when you pick a piece of information and describe it in your own words with quotation marks (“”) to which you point to the real author. To highlight that you're using the author's exact words, you can also use words like "it is stated," "according to," and so on.
Source
But on the other hand, a citation is the type of reference to the source. When you pick the information from any source or website, then you have to provide the reference to the real author.
Adding citations or quotations is really useful in plagiarism. Because when you quote or cite the information, your readers or professors will know that the piece of information belongs to another author and that you have added a reference to it in the form of a citation or quotation.
Remember that you can only quote a few sentences, not the entire text or paragraph. If you quote the entire text, the percentage of plagiarism will not be decreased.
Change the Structure of Sentences
Another useful tip that can help students to avoid plagiarism in the content is to change the structure of the sentences. It is also similar to paraphrasing, but it plays its own role.
When you change the structure of the content, it changes the tone, but its meaning doesn't change. As a student, you can also change the structure of sentences to avoid plagiarism.
There are two ways that can help you in changing the structure of sentences, one is done manually, and the other is an online tool. Manually, you can change the sentence structure by changing the sentence voice (active to passive & vice versa) and words with their alternatives, which will help you to avoid plagiarism.
You can also change the structure of sentences by using an online plagiarism changer. An online plagiarism changer is the best option if you want to improve the quality of text and also make it unique.
These online plagiarism changers have a very advanced type of AI technology in their algorithm, which helps these tools to scan the given text and change its structure.
You can choose any plagiarism-changing tool that can help you to restructure your sentences. This is how you will be able to avoid plagiarism in your academic writing.
5. Use an Online Plagiarism Checker
An online plagiarism-checking tool is the best way when it comes to avoiding copied text in academic writing. To avoid plagiarism, you should know which part of the write-up is plagiarized. If you don't know which part is plagiarized, then how will you be able to avoid it or eliminate it?
So, that's why there is always a need to check the plagiarism before you submit your academic paper. You can only check the plagiarism in your content by using an online tool. There are a variety of online plagiarism checkers available on the internet that work to scan the copied text.
Moreover, try to choose a good plagiarism checker because every tool is not doing its job properly.
Conclusion
So, this post was all about how students can avoid plagiarism in their academic writing. We have answered this query with five effective tips that can help you.
The first that can help you to avoid plagiarism is to do proper research on your topic and gather all essential information from online sources. Another useful tip that can help you is to paraphrase your text without changing its real meaning. This tip is very effective in eliminating plagiarism.
You can also avoid plagiarism in your content by adding citations and quotations in your content. This tip is also helpful, but in this tip, you need to make sure that the reference you provide is correctly given or not.
