Plagiarism - An Academic Crime

Plagiarism (misuse of others' creative works, ideas, words and images) is considered one of the biggest academic crimes on the international level. An Academic Paper s considered as plagiarized when a college or university student steals the words, ideas, and academic point of view of others without referring or citing the specific author. In this way, plagiarism is stealth of work where the offender plagiarizes unknowingly or knowingly, some viewpoints or quotes or some other piece of writings. When an author uses ones words, sentences, viewpoints and quotes without proper citation, he would be guilty of plagiarism. At the educational institutes, when college students are accused of plagiarism, they have to face severe kind of penalty on the behalf of such academic crime by presenting plagiarized academic papers.

The word, ‘plagiarism' is indisputably one of the most notorious words and it is of serious concern how to check this grave academic crime. Some writers just change certain parts of their academic essays while rest of their essay remains unchanged, though they try to rewrite all the content but the structural content of their term paper remains the same. Some writers are accustomed to copy-paste the content from different websites and then change some phraseology with great manipulation, but if some sentences are not changed erroneously, it would be counted as aggravated academic crime, plagiarism.

The word plagiarism is derived from a Latin word, which implies kidnapping or stealing and in academic point of view, plagiarism is to transcript ones viewpoints in his writing. Plagiarism is a serious offense, which is growing academic issues in the colleges and universities. What are the fine charges or penalties? The penalties on this criminal act are different, depending upon the institute or country. Some universities or colleges penalize the college students for plagiarism in term papers, academic essays by expelling them or accusing with official transcript record or suspending the students from the university or college.

There should be implementation of copyright laws, which can be imposed upon the offenders who cheat the teachers by plagiarizing their academic papers or term papers from multiple sources like internet, newspaper, magazines and books etc. The students should be trained by the teacher in a way that they never tend to plagiarize any kind of writing from any sources without citation. The students should enhance their own creative power by making efforts for writing genuine academic paper. If the students always try to cheat different ideas, words and sentences from other sources, they would never improve their thinking and writing abilities. The students should work hard to learn and improve their writing ability rather than committing the serious offence of plagiarism!

Types of plagiarism

There are a number of categories of plagiarism with varying degrees of academic crime, evaluated by different educational institutes. When the students or writers transcript the academic papers of others, it would be charged as academic misconduct or academic crime. The students are penalized by their principle authorities of the institutes by threatening expulsion from the institute, reduction of total percentage of course marks or failure in the annual academic exams. Various types of plagiarism include:

1. Copy and Paste Plagiarism

When the writer picks a very important phrase or entire sentence from other sources like the internet, or books etc without providing any reference in their term papers it is considered as copy and paste plagiarism. This is the worst type of plagiarism which receives extreme punishment and must, therefore, be avoided at all times.

2. Word Switch Plagiarism

If the writer takes a sentence from any other source and changes some words to their synonyms, it is still considered a kind of plagiarism. It is very important to cite the sentences taken from other sources such as articles or online journals. When a writer plagiarizes some content, he is too inefficient to create ideas as exposed in the source articles and in such cases, there is no use of quotation marks or citation.

3. Metaphor Plagiarism

Metaphors are used for the clarification of ideas, emotions and feelings via analogous similes rather than demonstration of the object or process so simply. Metaphors are taken as most significant style of creative writing. When the writer uses metaphors from other sources for the illustration of his ideas without giving credit to the author of the source article, it is considered as metaphor plagiarism.

4. Idea Plagiarism

If the writer steals a creative idea for the solution of any problem from other sources without attribution to the writer of the original source, it is called idea plagiarism. As the students or writers who plagiarize any kind of content, they are incapable to distinguish the ideas or solutions of problems by using public domain information or common knowledge.

5. Reasoning Style/Organization Plagiarism

When a writer or student follows the source articles sentence-by-sentences or paragraph-by-paragraph for writing his own term paper , it is taken as plagiarism, even though there is no exact match of any kind of logical sequence of ideas or order with the source articles accordingly. It is considered as transcript of the authors' reasoning style.

6. Complete Plagiarism

When the entire work of an academic paper has been copied from more than one source, even if the references are given properly, it is still taken as complete plagiarism as it is no genuine work, or transcription of the information from the students or writers.

7. Partial plagiarism

Such kind of plagiarism involves including sections of exactly copied and unaccepted sources within the academic assignment.

8. Concealing sources

The writers should give proper references with text-in-citation of the sources which are acknowledged, it doesn't matter how many times you use such references in your academic papers, if not, then it is taken as concealing your real sources.

9. Self-plagiarism

When the writers re-use or rewrite their previously written work or information in new assignment without any proper references, it is called self-plagiarism.

Tips on Writing an Essay

Before writing an essay it is of utmost importance to know what an essay actually is. An essay is a series of paragraphs, each dealing with a different aspect and all are arranged in a form in which they look connected as a whole. It is the expression of one's ideas and thoughts. It enhances the creativity of one's mind. Presented here are particular tips that would help you write your essay easily:

Tips

First of all, selection of the essay topic is a very difficult task and one must choose the topic of the essay with great care. You should be very clear in every single point of view and thoughts so that the reader should be fully satisfied and must feel as if someone is communicating. For this purpose one requires practice so that the mistakes should be to a minimum. Try to be simple and original. The writer must link one idea to the other to form a sort of a chain to make it impressive.

Once you have a clear idea of your subject and a collection of ideas in your mind, you should make the outline of the whole essay. Try to remove irrelevant ideas and arrange the relevant ideas under suitable headings. It should be logical and continuous so that the essay should give the impression of a stream running from beginning to end. Thirdly, ideas should have direct connection with the central theme. Use the technique of supporting paragraphs like writing one paragraph at same time along with supporting paragraphs as we make headings along with sub headings. Supporting paragraphs should be with supporting ideas. Do not change the idea or the order in any context. The reader expects a regular serial of thoughts connected as one. It is more beneficial if you put the examples of your own personal experiences and prove it with few logic and arguments to explain the topic sentence.

There must be a continuous chain between the paragraphs so that the reader should be more convenient to know what is next. If you are not really sure about it, then you ought to think over the suggestions and put it earlier. Practice writing one supporting paragraph and evaluating, revising and editing it. When you feel confident, develop two supporting paragraphs in a row and analyze how they fit together. When you are sure then try developing all three at the same time. Make sure that the ideas are well and they are connected with each other and can also flow easily from one to the next. After having all that material/thesis ready the student should be set about writing the essay. The language must be your own. It should be simple, comprehensive, clear and straight forward. The expression should be original. You must have good command over your spellings and grammar as well.

Most of the students copy sentences from books, articles, journals and numerous other sources and this is an academic crime known aa plagiarism which has to be avoided under all circumstances. In the end you will have to present a concluding paragraph. It should wind up the whole idea in a natural way, which means the essay should not be brought to an abrupt end. It should give the impression that nothing else remains to be said. Finally, make sure that you revise your essay well to avoid mistakes and irrelevant ideas.