Committing Plagiarism without Knowing It

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a serious breach of the concept of ownership. When one commits plagiarism, he trespasses the rights of others, particularly the owner of the idea or work being copied. Trespassing is never good. Aside from stepping on the line of privacy of an owner, plagiarism also entails committing other sins. These sins would include lying, deceiving, and stealing. This is another reason why committing a single plagiarism would certainly burden one’s conscience. There are also people who would hide behind the reason that they are ignorant of how exactly plagiarism is committed. Thus, this forms another classification in plagiarism. There are plagiarisers who know that they are plagiarising but still get on with it. The second classification would be those plagiarisers who keep on doing what they normally without knowing that they are already plagiarising. The second group would be like guilty for the actual commitment of the sin but since they do not know that they are doing subtle or outrageously loud cheating, they may be excused.

Kinds of Plagiarism

As how a famous legally-related quote is stated, “ignorance excuses no one,” since there are still many who claim of unknowingly plagiarising the works of other people, the best way to cure their ignorance would be to educate them well. The next time around, they cannot protect themselves if they will continue the habit of plagiarism. Here are the different ways by which plagiarism can be done:

1. Citation of sources
   This is usually due to the absence of proper coverage of the whole sources of the contents of the work that you wrote. There are certain conventions and formats as to how the citations should be laid out in order to avoid being accused of plagiarism. Anyone can access these through the Internet. Your sources should be given the right amount of spotlight for without them, you would not have been able to create the piece that you have now.
2. Paraphrasing
   This is like gathering different pieces of works and putting them all together in “your” work, just like doing a paper mosaic. This may result to a believably beautiful piece but that you would proudly own as yours. Because there are many original and scattered sources, the plagiarized work may not be totally proven as plagiarised at all. However, there are now plagiarism checkers stored as software. Thus, caution should be totally at the side of the plagiariser. With technology, the identification of plagiarism can be easily done.
3. Word redress
   This is the simple changing of the words themselves in order to deceive the reader through the new appearance of the piece of work but essentially, the plagiarised work has the same concept as the original. Redressing can be done by using the synonyms of each word or by rearranging a few words here and there.

How Do you Stop It?

In order to make the unknowing commitment of plagiarism, everyone, especially the student who are the ones more likely tempted to plagiarise works, should be taught of the consequences of violating the ownership rights of other people by plagiarising their work. This is why patents are made, in order to help in the argument of who owns what. Patent is a legal title that will be awarded to the original creator of an idea or piece.