Intentional and Unintentional Plagiarism – Part 2

Now we go to every student’s favorite mistake, cutting and pasting. With the internet over flowing with information and research, student’s get tempted or down right think it is easier to just cut and paste sentences and paragraphs that they think will go together. A lot of them do not understand that they should be the one to make their own concept and ideas, and in the process learn. What they do is look for specific information and just mixed them together. Fortunately it is easy to detect these kinds of plagiarism with the same tool they used to plagiarize, the internet. The internet has websites that offer plagiarism detection.

So the main difference between intentional and unintentional is that, unintentional plagiarism happens when there is no proper documentation occurred. The other kind is just plain and simple trying to finish the paper work the easy way.

So what are the reasons why students plagiarized? Read the following statements by some students caught plagiarizing.

“I have a lot of school work; I do not have much time” or “it was good enough for my former school”

Some kids in school just do not think that they can do a good job. What they tend to do is just to finish the assigned task and ignore that the reason why the task was given is for them to learn. They think that having a good article wherever it was from is good enough for the teacher, but the real purpose of a paper work is for them to learn to write and express their ideas. It is not about having a good article that has been copied from someone else. It is about learning.

Now that everything is clear, students should avoid intentional plagiarism, they should actually not plagiarize, do not purchase works from the internet, they should stop the copy and paste technique. School works is about learning, not stealing or cheating. Avoid unintentional plagiarism by doing proper documentation and citation.