What you need to know about plagiarism

Our professional writers here at OwnEssays.com treat the issue of plagiarism very seriously. Their goal is to help students learn how to write without plagiarism. Once you know the pros and cons of paraphrasing, you will for sure think twice before doing it. We want to teach you how to copy and paste without plagiarizing. After reading this article, you will have a clear understanding of how not to be accused of plagiarism when writing your essay.

The days before Internet

One might think that in the days before internet no one plagiarized.

That’s not exactly true. Back in the early days, we had to copy all of the information we received in class into our notepads. Then, we would go to a library, find more information, and put all of that in the paper. There were no such services as Turnitin that checked for plagiarism. The only way to detect plagiarism was by spotting unusual wording or checking the paper sentence by sentence using Google.

Hence, students were never taught how not to plagiarize because there was no way of checking it.

Nowadays, we should understand that writing without plagiarism or copying and pasting without plagiarism is very important, it makes essay writing easy. 

Understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it

The goal of this article is to help you understand more about plagiarism and how to avoid it. We don’t want your teacher to accuse you of submitting a plagiarized argumentative essay or research paper. This blog should teach you how to copy and paste without plagiarism; we know that it is almost never the intention of students to submit plagiarized work and we are here to help you learn. We will illustrate the rules of professional writing, and you will learn that asking your colleagues, classmates, or teachers for help is a good thing, you don’t have to be ashamed to ask for help.  

Essay writing made easy: When do I cite

When writing a book report on a book you just read with your class, you might wonder if you need to cite all of your information. The information you cite depends on the referencing style used.

The most popular and widely used ones are:

• APA
• MLA
• Chicago/ Turabian
• Harvard

In some cases you have to cite the name of the author and the year of publication, while in other cases you only cite the last name of the author and page number. If you’re using direct quotes, you always have to use quotation marks and indicate the page number where the text is found in the source used.  You may or may not use footnotes, depending on the referencing style used. Typically, you should be citing everything that comes from a different source. 

There are two things that you don’t have to put into direct quotation marks: 

• General Common Knowledge 
• Field Specific Common Knowledge. 

General Common Knowledge – is information that is available to the public: date of birth and death of a famous person, War dates, political events – basically anything that is available to general public.

NOTE: not citing information due to ‘general knowledge’ rule can get quite tricky.

For example, do you cite the dates of the famous Napoleon battles? Do you cite the name of Hitler’s mother? These things are very difficult to address properly, we’ll devote a separate article to the peculiarities of citing general knowledge sources.  

Field-Specific Common Knowledge is relevant to a particular field or specialty. It could be just about anything: facts, theories, dates, etc. When writing a math report, you would not have to quote the person who invented the formula you are using.

At this stage, you are probably asking yourself a question to what extent you should be using other’s ideas. You, probably, have written a research paper that requires sources and you should give credit to those writers that have written first. But before, you do anything talk to your advisor or professor on how you should do it. Anytime you are using someone else’s idea, you should put in quotation marks. And this is how you would give credit to that person. 

This how we copy and paste without plagiarism, adding our ideas into a paper and giving other’s the credit for their work. This makes essay writing easy.