You cannot simply come up with everything that should be featured in your essay. You have to gather a lot of information by performing online research from pre-existing data.
It’s a rare case scenario when you can add information yourself without studying or researching the topic. This ability requires prior knowledge or hands-on experience.
But if you include information in your essay by performing online research or from another publication, you might become a victim of plagiarism. For a student or an academic writer, avoiding plagiarism is necessary because their reputation is on the line.
This article will feature some practical tips to avoid plagiarism in essay writing. We will also talk about the aspects which lie under the allegation of duplicated or plagiarized content.
What Actions Are Considered Plagiarism?
If we define it in simple terms, plagiarism is copying someone else’s written work and claiming it to be your original work.
It’s a severe offense in academic writing and essay writing, as a student who submits plagiarized work ruins their credibility with evaluators, ultimately affecting their grades. The following actions are considered plagiarism in an essay:
- Submitting someone’s research paper, article, thesis, or a part of any of these works.
- Mentioning ideas or expressions without giving credit to the original creator in your essay.
- Not placing the quotation marks properly with the quotes you’ve used from another publication.
An essay writer should keep these aspects in mind while researching and implementing the information in their work. It encourages a writer to maintain authenticity. However, there are several tips writers should know to reduce plagiarism by a considerable ratio.
Tips to Avoid Plagiarism
When you’re writing an essay, thesis, assignment, or any other academic paper, you need to give yourself sufficient time.
As there is a famous proverb, “Haste makes Waste”, you should never write an essay right before the submission deadline.
Therefore, ensure to spare enough time to implement these practical tips conveniently in your essay:
● Use a Plagiarism Checker
Any writer is incomplete without this tool. A plagiarism checker allows writers to evaluate the quality of their essays to see if it’s unique or not. Such tools perform a thorough analysis of each and every sentence mentioned in a context.
Plagiarism checking is necessary before submission to evaluate your writing abilities. It also provides a descriptive plagiarism report which can be helpful to attach as the supporting evidence with your essay.
● Cite Sources
Nowadays, everyone is dependable on the internet for gathering and learning authentic information. The most credible source you may find is probably the internet for essay writing.
It provides you with a wide range of eBooks, research papers, and journals, so you don’t have to spend hours in a library. You can gather all the knowledge you want, but it is only wise if you add a reference to the borrowed material from any of these studies.
In order to properly cite a source, you have to mention the name of the author, publishing date, page number, and title of the topic from where you have borrowed material. Make sure to attach a reference page with your essay to summarize all the mentioned sources.
● Feature Quotations
Quotations are probably the best way to fill in the word count and avoid plagiarism at the same time. You can mention a quote in an essay by prominently adding those lines.
Using quotation marks at the beginning and end of a quote is recommended to denote it is different from the rest of the essay’s body.
You can also mention credits to the author by saying their name under the quotation. This writing style prevents others from accusing you of committing plagiarism.
● Cite Yourself
Repeating your previously written work in a new essay or assignment is a form of plagiarism known as self-plagiarism.
It’s not just about producing content yourself, but to avoid plagiarism, you have to be unique each time you write something. Self-plagiarism is a form of unintentional plagiarism if someone has to write an essay on the same topic repeatedly.
You can cite your piece of writing following the same method you use for other sources. If it is mentioned in your essay writing guidelines, make sure to follow the appropriate writing style.
● Learn Paraphrasing
This technique is most effective yet practical if you want to avoid plagiarism in content. Every writer should be familiar with the paraphrasing technique. It’s about rewriting someone else’s ideas in your own words without changing their apparent meaning.
Writers can also take help from a paraphrasing tool to rewrite an original passage in a concise and readable form. These tools provide different writing styles and tones to attain more of a formal sense in an essay.
Paraphrasing helps remove or reduce plagiarism, making the essay more readable. You can extract information directly from an authentic source by following this technique.
● Proofread and Edit
This tip should be followed once you are done writing your essay. You have to be strict with yourself by manually evaluating your essay. Most of the time, essay writers ignore proofreading, which tends to leave a lot of mistakes in their work.
Go through word by word to hint at any technical mistakes like preposition placement, improper citations or spelling errors. While proofreading, you can edit these mistakes to make your essay error-free.
Conclusion
Essay writing is a skill that defines the writing abilities of a student. It is an essential part of every student’s academic life which is also conducted as a co-curricular activity. Uniqueness and conciseness are the key elements which are evaluated through essay writing.
Writing is an essential skill for students as it defines how well they can elaborate information. It tests the accuracy, and implementation abilities of knowledge students have learned through practical experience.
