The line transcending ‘inspiration’ is often so thin that the risk of falling into the maneuver of ‘plagiarism’, is indeed elusive.
Using someone else’s words and proposals as your own or without legitimately crediting the bona fide author himself, is termed as plagiarism and paves the path to committing literary theft. Plagiarism can happen either of the two ways – deliberately or accidentally. To intentionally steal the words or thoughts of another is deemed as theft and violation of copyrights. However, plagiarism often occurs accidentally as a result of negligence or forgetfulness. Either way, it is considered a serious academic and intellectual offense and will be adequate to ruin your reputation while damaging your grades.
Gathering information from a broad spectrum of reliable sources and writing a thesis paper is no easy task. Almost everyone gets wrapped around the dilemma of incorporating the references and pillaring their work based on the existing literature, without falling into the den of plagiarism. However, to help you steer clear of trouble, here are some of the best tips to ensure that your paper and hours of hard work, are free of plagiarism.
Keep a beady eye on the sources you confer in your research.
A baseline factor to help keep plagiarism from plaguing your paper and at bay, is to keep a track of your sources. You can easily achieve this by taking notes and recording the sources of all the information you have acquired during the research process, before initiating the writing task. This will help you abundantly as among the many ways students commit plagiarism, one of the most common and highlighted approaches is simply by forgetting and disregarding the whereabouts of an idea and unintendedly presenting it as their own.
However, you can substantially avert being a victim of this pitfall by maintaining a list of citations and having a log of organized notes at your disposal – this includes sources conferred not only from journal articles or books but from magazine articles and websites as well. Now whenever you are about to add a fact or phrase in your content, you can easily go back and check where you found it and avoid plagiarism altogether.
Quote and paraphrase from sources while adding in your own ideas.
While working on your paper, if you wish to include a notion or chunk of information from a source into your content, then you have two ways of doing so – quote the original content or paraphrase it. To quote a piece of text is to copy it word for word, enclosing it within proper quotation marks and precisely ascribing the bona fide author. However, paraphrasing refers to explaining something from a reference/source in your own words, allowing you to concisely highlight the prime aspects of information present in the text. A vast student population seeks to find and avail themselves of a good dissertation writing service for the very reason of repeatedly having plagiarism detected within their content. The factor causing this disturbance is simple – they lack the understanding of correctly quoting and paraphrasing text.
In retrospect, paraphrasing is generally the preference over quoting as it signifies the dominance of your voice in the paper as you narrate your own ideas into the content, thus, cutting down any potential risks of plagiarism.
Credit and cite the original author/source.
If and whenever you decide to quote or paraphrase the text, it is crucial that you include an in-text citation in your paper, that comprehensively identifies the actual author. For instance, if you are referring to a source containing marketing dissertation topics and make your pick from there, you must accredit it. Citing the original source often also reveals the publication year and details the page number, too. It is essential for every in-text citation to correlate with either the reference present in the reference list or with the bibliography at the end of the paper, allowing the reader to discover the source by themselves.
There are multiple distinct and well-known citation styles being used out there, and each one possesses unique directives for citing. Among the most common ones are MLA, APA, and Chicago style. A prime factor to keep in regards while using these is their consistent application throughout the content as the failure of doing so may lead to the detection of plagiarism.
Utilize a plagiarism checker prior to the submission.
Nearly all professors and universities make use of plagiarism checkers to locate plagiarism in the papers submitted by students. This tool is purposed to scan across your content, compare and run it against a wide database of websites and publications, and underline the text that closely resembles other texts.
However, you can make use of this software too before submitting your work. This will help you pinpoint any regions where you may have forgotten a citation or paraphrased content similarly to the original text. If you find such flaws in your thesis paper, you can easily erase them with the help of the tips mentioned above and wave goodbye to any potential occurrence of plagiarism.
In conclusion,
Plagiarism can have critical and far-reaching consequences. Therefore, be sure to incorporate these simple tips and use them as a guide every time while writing a thesis paper, to guard yourself against plagiarism.
