Play By The Rules: Avoid Plagiarism In Your College Essay Writing

College professors give their students essay on different topics to write about to judge their analyzing and presentation skills. They expect their students to write a properly drafted and non-plagiarized content. However, it is not an easy task to develop a unique and original essay on your own until you are aware of some of the suggestive measures that can help you to avoid plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the act of copying someone else’s views and opinions and establishing them as the writer’s authentic idea. In fact, most students are guilty of plagiarism because of ignorance as they cannot make out how to avoid plagiarism. There are also writers who tend to commit such mistake intentionally, but in either case, it leads to disqualification of the content ultimately leading to lower grades in academic curriculum thereby resulting in failure. So, before writing an essay it is necessary to know what plagiarism actually is and how it can affect the academic performance of a student. Below are some of the types of plagiarism that needs to be avoided while writing a college essay:

Types of Plagiarism to Avoid

Direct Plagiarism

This is the most common type of plagiarism that is quite difficult to avoid during the course of writing. This entails copying the content of another person which has already been made public but without using quotation marks or providing attribution to such author. When students refer external sources for writing their academic essay they often end up copying from a specific source which they find relevant to their essay topic without paying much attention to the fact that such content can be considered a copied, if not referenced or quoted correctly.

Self-Plagiarism

This is mostly a result of the actions of the writer. While submitting a college essay, due to lack of time, students often resort to short-cut methods like rephrasing or recycling an already written essay and submitting the same. Since plagiarism checking software is used to detect the uniqueness of a submitted essay; there is already a database of existing essays included in such application. This leads to the rephrased content being often detected as completely plagiarized upon checking. This is an unethical practice and often results in severe actions on the part of the professor.

Accidental Plagiarism

This mostly occurs due to paraphrasing of content to develop a unique write up but this is not so effective in eradicating plagiarism. Such a plagiarism may occur when the student overlooks any citation sourced from an external place.

Mosaic Plagiarism

It is not possible for a student to write an essay on a topic all on his own. A good essay can only be crafted with the help of information taken from various external sources. A mosaic plagiarism occurs when the writer borrows phrases from outside sources without providing quotation marks or uses synonyms for the language of the author while keeping the general structure and meaning of the content same. Also referred to as path writing, this kind of plagiarism, whether intentional or unintentional, should be considered academically dishonest and the writer be penalized accordingly.
Plagiarism tends to damage the reputation of the educational institution from where the student submitting plagiarized content belongs and puts forward a big question mark on the academic degree it gives. Hence, severe penal provisions have been imposed by different educational institutions to discourage the act of plagiarism, be it intentional or not. Now, you must be thinking what is the way out by which such unethical act can be avoided? Well, the answer lies in certain suggestive measures that need to be taken while developing your college essay.

Rules to Follow to Avoid Plagiarism

Some of them are as follows –

1. The essay content should be written without relying exclusively on external sources. You should align your concepts well and document them as per your understanding and self-analysis about the topic.
2. If you are required to write a well-researched content, then carry out an in-depth research and write down what you have understood from analyzing the contents of the source. But your interpretation should not differ much from the source content. Information from external sources is just for reference purpose and you should not rely completely on them for writing your college essay.
3. If you are borrowing the exact words from a source and the total word count sums up to more than 40, then the same text should be provided within quotation marks. However, if the word count turns out to be less than 40 then it should be presented as an indented block without the use of quotation marks. The sources used in the text and in the bibliography should be given proper credit.
4. Citing is one of the reliable options to avoid plagiarism. Follow the formatting guidelines issued by your college professor (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) for writing the essay. This requires mentioning the date of publication and name of the author or similar other information. Not citing in a proper manner can lead to plagiarism issues.
5. If you are using your own material which has been previously written in the same class, college or anywhere else, then you must cite your own text. This may sound odd but this is the proper way to avoid self-plagiarism. Treat your own content in the same manner as someone else using it would have done.
6. Even when you don’t want to commit a plagiarism intentionally it might be that you fail to properly paraphrase the text of a source, forget to make a citation or accidentally use any of your previous works without altering the structure. Therefore, it is always recommended to run your essay through a reliable plagiarism checker before the final submission. This will ensure that your essay is free from any plagiarised essay and has been written following the highest ethical standards.

So, the next time you are given an essay topic to write on as a part of your academic curriculum, make sure that you follow these handy tips to successfully overcome the chances of any plagiarized content in your write-up.