Avoiding plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. In other words, when you plagiarize you fail to acknowledge the sources of those ideas that are not your own. This is one of the most serious offences you can commit as an academic and the punishment can consequently be severe. If your examiners feel you have a case to answer, you will probably be asked to explain yourself formally to a committee and you may be downgraded or even fail your dissertation or thesis should the committee determine that you are guilty of plagiarism.

What is particularly sad about many plagiarism cases is that they are, in fact, unintentional. Either because they come from an educational culture with different academic writing conventions and/or a different perspective on the citing of others’ work, or because they simply forget to acknowledge a source, students often submit their work unaware of what they’ve done and the reaction it will provoke. Another problem is that some find it difficult to know when an idea is somebody else’s and when it’s their own. This tends to happen when they’ve taken another scholar’s idea and either developed it in some way or applied it in a completely different context to that in which it was originally proposed. Unfortunately, whatever the reason, a plagiarism committee will not be interested in it; they will consider it a case of plagiarism regardless of whether it was deliberate or not. So beware!

The main way to avoid accusations of plagiarism is to be attentive to the origins of your ideas, meticulous in the way you record your sources and comprehensive with your in-text referencing, the focus of our next sub-section.

(Inside Track to Writing Dissertation and Thesis)

Task 18. Study the table and discuss with a partner the ways of avoiding plagiarism.

Avoiding plagiarism

Copying phrases from other people’s work is perfectly acceptable and is a good way to learn useful phrases in English that you can then use in your own work. However, such phrases must be 100% generic in the sense that they hold absolutely no hard information.

Use direct quotations sparingly. The problem is that the referee (or your professor) cannot be sure that you have fully understood the quotation.

Never paraphrase technical words.

If the original contains ideas that in some sense ‘belonged’ to the original author, then this author should be acknowledged. This is true even if you have radically changed the original so that it is now unrecognizable.

When quoting the work of a ‘third’ author, cite the reference to that third author’s paper.

Typical ways to paraphrase:

use of synonyms for non key words (especially verbs, adverbs and adjectives)

change of part of speech, for example: from noun to verb, from noun to adjective, from one category of noun to another category of noun (e.g. science to scientist)

change of nouns and pronouns from singular to plural and vice versa

change of verb form, for example: from –ing form to infinitive, from simple to continuous, from active to passive

change of style from personal to impersonal

reversal of the order in which information is presented

(English for Writing Research Papers)