Plagiarism is one of the most crucial problems of academic writing. Today, the level of plagiarism increases due to the easy access of Internet sources. Many students copy the sentences or the ideas of the researchers or other students without marking it as the citation. The results of such method of writing lead to a number of problems.
First of all, copying someone’s words, the student does not reflect about the real meaning of the particular idea; therefore, he/she does not comprehend the topic appropriately. Moreover, in some situations, plagiarism can be considered as a crime, copyright infringement. It is obvious that plagiarism is a significant problem within the process of academic writing.
There are several aspects of possibility of plagiarism. Firstly, it may happen by chance due to the use of the facts which the student may consider as common or well-known. In this case, he/she does not provide a name of the author or source. However, this problem can be easily avoided by the use of the quotation marks and footnotes or endnotes.
Surely, everyone has the different writing ability. Therefore, many students try to search some information that can help them to cope with the assignments. They cite not only the sources which are appropriate and can be used in a paper, but also the samples of works of other students without changing the structure of sentences, paragraphs or even the whole texts.
Most of the time, such work fails the verification procedure and gets the negative responses. In order to avoid this problem, students should paraphrase sentences or to restate it in a different way. Thus, there will be evidence that the student wrote this paper by oneself and comprehended the topic well.
As it was mentioned before, when the student use the certain facts or ideas, it is necessary to mark it as a citation. The various citation styles have the different requirements of the endnotes and footnotes. However, all of them emphasize the necessity of an adequate citing.
Besides, when the student uses an appropriate quotation from a good source, this point can help to get better results. The teacher will admit that the student made a deep research, analyzing the related texts.
Additionally, today there is an access to the programs which can check the paper, indicting the sentences that have to be reworded. Although many people may suppose that this issue is not significant, I totally disagree with this statement. Plagiarism can be considered as a stealing of someone’s property and, depending of the level of seriousness, the person who uses plagiarism can bear the disciplinary or criminal liability.
Academic writing has to demonstrate the personal ability to make the research, to analyze the ideas, compare and contrast the opinions and to express the reflection. Therefore, it is absolutely wrong to present someone’s idea or text as one’s own. Simple paraphrasing and the use of quotation marks will help to solve the problem.
However, it is always necessary to pay attention to the information provided in the text in order to be sure of its originality, importance and adequacy. As the use of Internet makes thousands of sources available, the different programs that check the plagiarism are also can be accessible and used in order to solve this serious problem of academic writing.