Defined as the act of stealing and passing off ideas or words of another person’s as your own, plagiarism is a serious offense in academia, and it is punished severely. Students are expected to always submit 100% original work and any duplicate content in an academic paper or essay is immediately flagged for plagiarism and thus rejected. Students can even face expulsion from school.
Thankfully, there are ways to be 100% certain that your paper is free of plagiarism before submitting it to your professor, such as using an online plagiarism checker. One of the best options on the market is the plagiarism checker free by PapersOwl. An advanced software tool able to check duplicate content in a text, PapersOwl tells you exactly what percentage and what lines of your paper are not original so you can correct them immediately.
All You Need to Know About Plagiarism and How to Avoid It
In recent years, due to the popularity of essay writing services, professors are much more suspicious when reading a student’s paper or essay. This means that the chance of your professor checking your assignment for plagiarism is extremely high, so you shouldn’t take any risks.
In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about how to locate plagiarism, how to avoid it, what consequences you can face as a student if caught for plagiarism, and how to be certain that you are not at risk of such an accusation.
What Exactly Is Considered Plagiarism?
There are many things that can bring you the accusation of plagiarism. Some college students aren’t fully aware that what they’re doing is considered as such so they fail to take precautionary measures. These are the main practices that will cause your assignment to be flagged for plagiarism:
- You Submit a Free Paper or Essay from the Internet. A most common trap that students struggling with their assignments fall into is taking a free online paper or essay and submitting it as their own. Since this document is free, you can be certain that it was downloaded countless times by other students, so maybe your professor has received the same essay before. Nonetheless, this case of plagiarism is easy to detect by professors.
- You Don’t Give Credit to Someone Else’s Ideas or Words. When they write a paper or essay, students usually find interesting ideas in other sources that match their essay questions or research topic. However, if you use an idea word-by-word from someone else’s article or book without giving credit to the original author, your paper will be considered plagiarized.
- You Don’t Use Quotation Marks for Quotes. When students forget to add quotation marks to a quote, it seems that they simply copied the words without due credit. Any verbatim reference from a book or article must be inserted using quotation marks.
- You Give False Information About Your Source. Even if you use references and in-text citations, they must be completely accurate and correct. Any mistake in citing your sources will doom your paper.
- You Copy Some Ideas but Change Words Around Without Credit. Some students believe that when they write someone else’s idea in their own words, nobody can tell that they took from somewhere else. However, this still constitutes plagiarism because you are copying an idea.
Why Plagiarism Is Dangerous?
The effects of being accused of plagiarism are very grave. This can range from a low grade to expulsion, depending on your school or university. In general, your professor will believe the following:
- That you’re untrustworthy and dishonest.
- That you’re not willing to put in the work to achieve your goals.
- That you don’t respect other people’s intellectual work.
How to Submit 100% Plagiarism-Free College Papers?
After we’ve seen the dangers of plagiarism, let’s dive into the main ways that you can protect yourself from such an accusation during your time in college.
Always Use Several Plagiarism Checkers
You can check for plagiarism free online tools that will detect and highlight any duplicate sentence or paragraph in your paper, giving you the exact percentage of content that is not original. This way you can see in real-time everything that is wrong in your text, and you can edit it thoroughly before sending it off. To be completely certain, you can screen your paper with two or three checkers.
Use Reliable Custom Writing Services
One of the main causes of the rise in plagiarism accusations in the academic world is that many students use custom writing services for their assignment needs. Unfortunately, not all these services are professional. It is well-known that scams exist in this market with some services reselling papers or working with unreliable and dishonest writers who plagiarize content. It’s hard to find a decent essay writing service, but not impossible.
If you’re in need of essay writing help, do extensive research and use a service with an established reputation and great feedback. Let’s take PapersOwl for example. While it is hard to trust reviews of essay writing services, there are is a professional review platform that you can trust and where you can find accurate and honest feedback about PapersOwl. According to reviews, this service delivers original papers written from scratch, so there’s no risk here.
Learn to Use Citations and References
A big cause of plagiarism is that students don’t know how to properly use academic formatting. When giving your paper a plagiarism check, ensure you master the following:
Citations.
Following a formatting guideline like APA or MLA, add information such as author, name of article or book, and date of publication to any idea taken from someone else’s work. By simply doing this, you risk no accusation, and you can add ideas from other works with respect to the author’s efforts.
Quotes.
You must use quotation marks when you use someone else’s words verbatim as they appear in another text.
References.
The first thing that your university professor will do to check plagiarism is to look at your reference page at the end of your paper. This should be a list of all sources you used for writing the paper. The reference list must include all information about all the books and articles you cited, such as author, date of publication, and others.
Find Professional Help
If you’re unsure about checking your own paper, what needs to be cited and how, and whether your quotes and references are accurate, read this article to get a better understanding of how to prevent plagiarism in your academic papers. You can also talk with an expert. A professional academic writer from an essay writing service will check for plagiarism and tell you whether your paper is at risk.
An accusation of plagiarism is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you as a student. Your academic reputation will suffer, and you won’t be able to get good recommendations from your professors if they think you’re a dishonest person. Learn to prevent plagiarism by following our comprehensive guide and your papers will be safe.
