5 Tips for Students to Avoid Plagiarism While Writing Assignments

5 Tips for Students to Avoid Plagiarism While Writing Assignments : Plagiarism is one of the worst things that can ruin a student’s career. It occurs when someone copies the content from another source and presents it as their own without crediting the original author.

There are many types of plagiarism, but the most common are direct plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and accidental plagiarism.

This can affect your academic year badly, like the institute can cancel your degree, or you may get expelled.

Many students keep wondering how they can write plagiarism-free academic papers like assignments or research reports if they’re using someone else information.

If you are also looking for an easy way that can avoid plagiarism in your assignments, then this topic will help you.

Here, we will show you some of the most important tips that can help you to keep your assignments from plagiarism.

Table of Contents

5 Valuable Tips That Can Help Students to Avoid Plagiarism in Their Assignments

So, as we have already discussed what plagiarism is and how it can occur in your assignments, we will now discuss how you can avoid it.

1. Gather the Data from Various Sources

Whatever form of academic paper you are expected to write, you must first do “research.” Right?

You must gather all necessary knowledge about the issue or assignment, but if you choose to research and collect data from only a few relevant resources, you risk plagiarism. There might be a lot of similarities found between your content and the original source.

So, that’s why you must broaden your research and gather data from a variety of sources. The more you study various sources, the more you’ll discover alternative approaches to writing about the same issue.

Let us make it easier for you to figure it out. For example, your homework has three separate headings to cover. You must collect information for each heading by doing research on each one.

Remember that you should not gather a passage or part only for the purpose of including it in your assignment. You can take important statements from several texts and then combine the ideas to build a new paragraph to cover the relevant heading of your assignment.

Whatever you write about, make sure your facts and language choices are drawn from a bunch of sources rather than just one.

If you follow this guideline, you will be able to avoid plagiarism in your assignments.

2. Use a Plagiarism Checker

If you don’t know which part is plagiarized, then it will be difficult for you to avoid it. So, there is always a need to check it.

You can also check the plagiarism in your content by using different online tools. These online plagiarism-checking tools use advanced algorithms that help the users to scan the text within a few seconds.

For checking plagiarism, you should be very careful in selecting a specific tool because there are hundreds of them present on the internet. Some of them are very effective in their work, and some of them are moderate. However, some plagiarism checkers are not even good at their work, and they cannot give accurate results.

There are some tools also available on the internet that are available for free and give accurate and effective results in checking. If you are a student, then the free plagiarism checkers can help you if you don’t have the budget to buy a premium one.

A free plagiarism checker provides plagiarism detection to its users without any cost. This can be useful for everyone, especially for students who are working on completing their assignments on time.

3. Paraphrase Your Writing

Paraphrasing is the process in which we change a piece of content using different words without altering the exact meaning. It is a better way for students to avoid plagiarism in their assignments.

You can paraphrase the text by changing some words with synonyms, rephrasing the sentence, or rewording the whole paragraph without altering the original context.

Along with this, you should remember paraphrasing doesn’t mean just changing two or three words in a copy-pasted text. You need to do proper paraphrasing, i.e., you should modify the content in your own words to show that you fully understand it.

4. Cite the Sources Properly

A citation is a reference to the source. When you pick the information from any source or website, then you have to provide the reference to the real author. In the citation, you’ve to add the author’s name, his book or website, chapter, and page in reference from where the information is taken.

Citation is very helpful in avoiding plagiarism because there is no need to paraphrase the text. By giving citations to the information, readers will understand that this piece of text is taken from another source. If they want to read in-depth about the information, then it will help them.

Other than that, you have to cite the reference properly. Some freshers often don’t know how to cite the source and which format is best.

There are many styles for citation, but the good one is APA for academic papers.

As you can see in the above image, this is how you can cite the source in the APA style.

5. Quote the Plagiarized Text

The quotation is defined as when you pick a piece of information and describe it in your own words with quotation marks (“”)with which you point to the real author. It is very helpful in avoiding plagiarism because when you quote the information, your readers will understand that the information belongs to another author and you have quoted them properly.

You can also include the words like “it is stated,” “mentioned that,” “in the words of,” etc., to indicate that you’re using the author’s exact words.

As you can see in the above image, this will be clear to you how you can quote the information correctly.

Conclusion

This post was all about how students can avoid plagiarism in their assignments. We have answered this question with five valuable tips that can help students in their writing.

The first tip was to do proper research on your topic and gather information from various sources. Along with this, if you think you have committed plagiarism in your writing, then you can also use a free plagiarism-checking tool to look for duplication.

If your text has plagiarism, then you can avoid it by paraphrasing your text. You can do this manually or by using online tools (as discussed above). If you don’t have time to paraphrase your assignment text, then the other way is to give proper citations to the text or quote them in quotation marks.

So, this is how you can avoid plagiarism while writing your assignments.

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