Term paper guidelines: tricks to help you avoid plagiarism

Many students are continually turning to the internet as a vast resource when writing a term paper. But as they do this they are failing to properly cite sources or to find authentic and academic resources that can be used as primary sources in a term paper. They are using common knowledge without citing it or providing content that has been reworded for their own gain and misrepresenting it as theirs.

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• 1. One of the easiest ways to avoid plagiarism when you write your term paper is to ensure you do not copy work done by others. This seems remedial, but the reason that so many students fail to realize they are plagiarizing is because they don’t take notes cautiously enough and end up copying the work of another author on accident.



It is imperative that while you research you take notes. As you take these notes, you need to write down citations to coincide with your quotes, data, statistics, and even the things you paraphrase. The most common mistake is for a student to paraphrase or summarize something in their notes, forgetting to put a citation next to it. They continue jotting down their thoughts beneath this paraphrase and when it comes time to write the final draft, they assume anything without quotes around it or lacking a number was authentic and original content, so they type it out. This results in plagiarism.

Students might also read over one source only (such as Wikipedia) and then paraphrase the content for their paper. Rephrasing or rewriting the work of someone else may be against the plagiarism policy of your academic institution.

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• 2. This is the second way to avoid plagiarism: to get to know your policy. Students today fail to review the academic policy for dishonesty and plagiarism from their academic institution. If you do not know what is considered bad, then you won’t know if you have done something bad. This is why you need to review it and make sure you know what is intolerable.



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• 3. Use plagiarism websites. There are many academic websites out there designed to help students properly cite their work. These websites enable you to run your content through and verify whether you properly cited your work and whether anything was missed. You can use many of these sites for free or for a nominal fee of a few cents per scan.

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