How can students avoid plagiarism

Try to be concise and clear. Using the words of another author will stand out from the rest of your work and may alert lecturers to possible plagiarism.

If you are making notes from your sources, remember to put direct quotations in quotation marks and always keep a note of your sources. This will help to ensure that you do not accidentally plagiarise. It also makes collating your references much easier when writing your assignments. You can keep track of your references using a tool such as Endnote Web.

If you do want to quote a short extract from another author's words exactly, make sure you enclose these words in quotation marks to indicate that it is a direct quote. Direct quotes should be used sparingly and shouldn't include large amounts of text.

They should be used where you are identifying an key idea or highlighting the place where you found the particular idea you are using. Don't forget if you are using someone else's ideas in your work you need to show this by referencing it. Remember in all cases, you must reference your sources correctly.

More on Referencing and citing. In the world of writing — especially academic writing — this is a serious crime and is treated as such. Give students examples of how and when they should credit the work of others in their writing. This way, they will have concrete cases to which they can refer when questions arise. The more unusual an assignment e. In addition, an assignment that has multiple parts may reduce the likelihood of plagiarism. Adding milestones to a written assignment where students must submit preliminary drafts of their work discourages them from the prospects of plagiarizing.

It also helps them spread a larger writing task over a longer period of time, so students are not as likely to be in the situation where they are sorely tempted to take the easy way out of the assignment. Instructors can use this online resource as an instructional and educational tool as well as a detection aid. Strategies to Avoid Plagiarism. Avoiding Plagiarism To avoid plagiarism, you must read, take notes, and write carefully.

The process slows you down enough to mentally process and more fully understand the ideas the author is trying to communicate. Note cards can be shuffled and rearranged as you organize your thoughts for your paper. Irrelevant information can be easily discarded. Because writing by hand takes most people more time than typing and certainly than copying and pasting , using paper notecards may help you limit the amount of direct copying you do of entire sentences.

This may encourage you to summarize more and also help you discover important distinctions between major and minor ideas and between more and less important details in what you read.

You may accidentally leave out essential information on a card. Writing on cards takes longer than cutting and pasting.