How to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a pressing issue today because of the abundance of information available to public on the Internet. And while lots of people deliberately attribute writings and sayings of others to themselves, sometimes it happens when they unconsciously produce texts with accidental plagiarism. There can be 3 cases when people unintentionally steal someone’s thoughts:

1. They think that these are their personal conclusions (sometimes people forget that they have read some facts in external sources);
2. They really come up with original conclusions but have no idea that someone has written about this before;
3. They simply forget to credit the author.

I think it’s a familiar situation for you. You do a research, suddenly the thought pops up in your brain and you think that it is so natural to draw such a conclusion (maybe because you have read about it before) or you gather information on some topic and put it in one place but then can’t really figure out which is yours and which is just copied from the external source.

So, how to avoid such situations? It is an extremely important issue as accidental plagiarism is still plagiarism. There are several steps that can prevent you from submitting work that is not 100% original and I will talk about them just now.

1. Check the most obvious deductions

When you’ve pulled a conclusion and it seems to be a very easy one because it’s logical, better check it up because the chances are that you’ve read about it before.

2. Don’t jump to your “genius” conclusion

I know that there are times when you think that you’ve discovered America but America was discovered years ago, so be careful.

3. Label everything you find for your topic

When you find the necessary information, ALWAYS highlight it and credit it to the real author, especially if it’s a draft. If you use MS Word, it’s very easy. With simple notebook just use highlighters.

4. Credit even paraphrased

If you think that someone’s words become yours when paraphrased, that is not true. Even if you change the words with synonyms or reverse the word order, you still need to credit.

That’s practically it. Very simple but crucial steps to follow in order not to be accused of plagiarism. I do that all the time and it helps me greatly. Hope that it will do the same for you.

Plagiarism: Something to Avoid or Our Inevitable Future

As writers you regard plagiarism as a matter of honor. At least I suppose so, associating feelings with my writer’s essence. The beauty is in the process of turning your thoughts into the coherent sentences that either trigger emotions or serve as guidelines for your readers. This is not all, of course, and you definitely know it.

Copying somebody’s opinion creates the feeling of some defectiveness and inability to produce an original idea or judgment. Consequently, every self-respecting writer stays away from plagiarism to feel self-confident and secure. But how many times you said the phrase: “You read my mind” or “That’s what I said”? How often do you come across texts on the Internet that seem similar, familiar or the same? Have you ever found phrases that you felt you would say exactly the same way?

Recently I’ve bumped into an interesting talk by Kirby Ferguson called “Embrace the Remix”. He told about Bob Dylan and people’s claims about him stealing songs, mentioned Apple patent of Multi-Touch in 2007 and records of its development way before Steve Jobs even dropped out of college. As a result he made a conclusion: “Everything is a remix”. And then it hit me. Everyday people produce tons of Internet content expressing different or similar thoughts sometimes in the same words. From time to time it seems to me that I have a genius and original idea but when I start surfing the Internet it appears that someone has already got the point. So, most of the time I attempt not to produce unique writing but to avoid plagiarizing and it feels not very good.

Well, the point is that I really have a fear that plagiarism is our inevitable future, that everything possible will be said in any possible way. But I do hope that the constant evolving of society and language will not let that happen.

And are you afraid of plagiarism?