Essay On Plagiarism: How To Avoid It In Your Essay
Plagiarism is the curse of school and college essays. It has become especially widespread in the XXI century – the century of the Internet and information technologies, when everybody is able to get any information he/she wants in few clicks without any efforts. Plagiarism is usually defined as purposeful illegal use of another person’s creative work results, which is accomplished with appropriation of another person’s intellectual possession. If you publish somebody else’s work or a fragment of this work and sign it with your name, especially if you do not mention the name of the borrowing source, it would be plagiarism. In simple words, plagiarism is presenting another person’s work as your own. College essay plagiarism is widely distributed phenomenon today. Plagiarism is considered to be a serious academic offence. Depending on how severe was the offence; the student who was recognized guilty in plagiarism can get a zero-mark in the course or even be expelled from the University. Therefore, you had better pay attention to this aspect, while writing your paper or use the service of some professional essay writers in order to avoid plagiarism. The first problem caused by plagiarism is lack of independent thinking among the students. Moreover, it cause the infringement of copyright. Another kind of copyright violation, which is often confused with plagiarism, is piracy. It includes illegal copying, use and publishing another person’s intellectual possession. Nevertheless, piracy usually do not imply another person’s work appropriation. Imitation, parody, borrowing of idea or quoting are not considered to be plagiarism. The definition of this concept still remains not perfectly clear and sometimes it is quite hard to find out unambiguously whether this is the case of plagiarism or not. Today we will try to define this term and explore its history. Moreover, in this plagiarism essay we will describe the ways of avoiding this problem in your academic papers.
History of the plagiarism
The term “plagiarism” has begun to being used in the contemporary meaning in the XVII century. In the law of ancient romans the word ”plagium” (literally “kidnapping”) was used to say about the case of an illegal selling of a free man into a slavery. It is interesting to mention that the attitude of the society to the phenomenon of plagiarism has dramatically changed during the history of the humanity. In the ancient times, use of another author’s texts was thought to be quite ordinary occurrence. The use of predecessors’ works was extremely widespread among historians, geographers and other scholars such as Plutarch, Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. The discovering of the ancient literature masterpieces in the Renascence times caused many attempts to appropriate ancient artist’s works. For example, Petrotti pretended to be the author of Phaedrus’ fables. Molière borrowed almost the full text from Cyrano de Bergerac. It would be appropriate to mention in your essay on plagiarism that Shakespeare was also famous for borrowing fragments of other authors’ texts or even someone else’s poems. In the XIX-XX centuries even the most prominent writers were blamed for plagiarism. Among them were Musset, Zola, Daudet, Schiller, Walter Scott and many others. In 1891 even the book dedicated to Lessing’s plagiarism was published.
Modern opinion about plagiarism
One may ask: “Why is it so important to avoid plagiarism? Is it really a big trouble if I have taken a fragment from someone else’s work? Who cares?”. Let me explain you. Plagiarism is a huge gap in the academic integrity. It destroys all the principles of intellectual honesty, which should be appreciated by every member of academic community. It is an unethical action, which could bring negative consequences for your education and future job. Moreover, using someone else’s work, you bereave yourself the opportunity to develop your critical and independent thinking. Besides, if you intentionally use fragments from someone else’s works, you, first of all, lie to yourself. The point is that you have come to the university to receive knowledge, learn how to frame your thoughts and how to speak and write properly. In order to get all these skills you should train yourself, develop your imagination and creativity. Essay writing is an indispensable method for these aims. Besides, reading more would be quite profitable for your writing skills since you would get a great basement for examples with you will be able to use in your essay. And don’t you think that it would be ridiculous if your essay about plagiarism will be full of plagiarism? Moreover, plagiarism is dishonest. You practically steal the work, which required a lot of efforts and diligence from another person. If you haven’t time for writing your essay, you’d better use help of our service, which can guarantee you a perfect plagiarism-free essay.
It is also worth being mentioned that revelation of plagiarism today is fulfilled by some computer software.
Nowadays copyright defending laws are operating in almost every country of the world. These laws have both pros and cons. For instance, they protect rights of authors, who have undergone the infringement of copyright. On the other hand, copyright law could be used for somebody’s mercenary interests as a method of dishonest competition, because of indistinctness of the concept.
However, it does not mean that you must not use other people’s work, while working on your papers. Vice-versa writing any academic work is impossible without use of materials written by others. You inevitably will use in your essays the ideas which were formulated long time before your birth. Avoiding essay plagiarism is not about avoiding of already known ideas, it is about your personal rethinking of these ideas and expressing them in your own style. Nevertheless, firstly you have to learn the art of citation, which is extremely important for any essay. By the way, proper use of quotes will give your readers an opportunity to follow your references and build up their own views on this subject. So you are able to write a perfect essay without plagiarism even if you are not a professional research paper writer.
How to get rid of plagiarism in your essays?
I would like to sum up with some useful tips on how to avoid plagiarism:
- Learn more about copyright in order to understand what plagiarism is;
- Try to heighten your awareness in the field you are writing about;
- Understand what needs citing and what doesn’t;
- Remember that you have two ways of arranging your references: start your phrase with “According to” (or another similar cliché) or put the phrase into quotation marks;
- All essays on plagiarism will advise you to reference all quotes and sources; you should necessarily include a bibliography to your work.
So now you are more informed about this issue and writing an essay without plagiarism is a piece of cake for you.