Identify the various forms of plagiarism - Research Paper Example

Plagiarism Introduction Plagiarism is the act of using other people’s written works or ideas either partly or wholly and presenting them as your own. The ideas may be from the internet, books articles or any other written work.Plagiarism can take a variety of forms based on how one presents the ideas borrowed from other works and sources. Most students and authors take exact words from another person’s work and present them as their own without making alterations in words. When this happens, they are involved in direct plagiarism.

Examples of direct plagiarism include when a student takes another student’s work and presents them as his/her own, and when a student downloads from the internet work that had been done and presenting it as his/her own. It also involves having someone do an assignment for you and presenting their findings or work as if you are the one who did the assignment (Gaines, 2007). Other students and authors will however not present works taken from the other sources in its original written form – they will rephrase other people’s ideas, research, opinion and information to come up with new works.

Though the work seems on the face value to be original, only the wordings have changed from the original author’s work but the ideas are borrowed. This is commonly referred to as manipulated plagiarism (Neville, 2007).Students and authors wanting to make their work juicy or more presentable may take parts of other people’s work and incorporate them with theirs to enrich their ideas. The additional pieces of work may be quotes, phrases from a paragraph or entire paragraphs. The use of these parts without acknowledging the source constitutes to partial or juice plagiarism (Gaines, 2007).

People also have a tendency of presenting their works either as a whole or in parts in more than one occasion or for different assignments. When this is done without letting the people using the work for the subsequent times know when the original work was done, one is considered to be involved in self plagiarism. This is most common when one is required to handle an assignment with similar requirements as the one he/she had previously handled (Neville, 2007).It is important for people to avoid plagiarism as much as possible.

The most important thing is for writers to know what constitutes plagiarism and the implications that one is likely to face if found guilty of plagiarism. Writers ought to know how to acknowledge sources of their work. They should know how to do referencing and citations properly using the different writing and referencing styles. Writers and students should also know how to incorporate quotations, sayings or speech and any other direct wordings in to their work. It is also of great importance that any writer gets enough knowledge on how to take notes from different sources.

This will help the author to avoid the use of word-by-word copying, which is direct plagiarism. The author/student should as well be able to have proper planning and time management skills while taking notes as this will help him/her to read ahead and form his/her own ideas that he/she will present. Lack of proper planning and time management will cause an individual not to have enough time to internalize ideas from other people and form they own opinions as they try to beat deadlines (Gaines, 2007).

Governments and institutions have tried to end plagiarism by making laws and regulations that will ensure punishment for those involved in it. The laws include expulsion or suspension from schools, cancellation of exams for students, and jail terms and heavy fines for citizens found guilty of plagiarism outside schools. Governments have also encouraged the establishment of organizations to safeguard the interests of the original authors. Such organizations include Copy Write Societies (Neville, 2007).

ConclusionI strongly believe that plagiarism is a crime that should be discouraged and avoided in all levels of writing. All writers and students should try as much as they can to avoid this vice throughout their writing careers and in schools respectively. Furthermore, law and regulation enforcements groups with regard to plagiarism should be vigilant to make sure that plagiarism is completely stopped.ReferencesGaines, Ann. Dont steal copyrighted stuff!: Avoiding plagiarism and illegal Internet downloading.

Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2008.Neville, C. (2007). The complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. Maidenhead New York: Open University Press.