Plagiarism (Essay Sample)

A guide to Ethical Writing: Avoiding plagiarism, Self-plagiarism, and Other Questionable Writing Practices
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Plagiarism is the act of stealing of material presentations from already written or done work and presenting them as own. Plagiarism can be either intentional or unintentional. Self–plagiarism is a kind of literary theft where an individual writer picks phrases directly from already written work to write new works. With regard to this, ethics is paramount when it comes to professional writing and presentation of research documents or ideas. In this paper, am going to vividly discuss various ethical guidelines that can perfectly help individual writers to present their work ethically while avoiding plagiarism.
Ethical writing is grounded on the principle that the writers’ work should be different or correctly paraphrased from the original. With regard to this, the writer or author should present ideas from the originator according to his or her best ability. This, therefore, means that clarity, accuracy and honesty are some of the practices which make a written article or document ethical. Writing errors may mislead the audience or a reader if the information is not chronologically presented. Plagiarism is the act of taking original work, for example, original images, words, phrases, and ideas so as to present his own work. Plagiarism can be regenerated or occurring accidentally without the knowledge of the writer.
First, one should gather all the sources he or she wants to use correctly and keep track of them to avoid confusion while citing. When referring to a certain source or consulting, one should ensure that he or she fully understands the thoughts and flow of ideas and carefully select what to use before commencing his or her work. Planning ahead is often vital as it will reduce time-consuming while refereeing to selected sources. One should carefully take notes to avoid copy-pasting and hence aid in generating new forms of reasoning or presentation of ideas before starting to write an article (Roig, 46).
To keep in touch with reference of writing maintain the citation format as per the writing guidelines. For example use of MLA, APA or any other relevant citation format. Quoting should be done in a way that reflects the documents exactly how it appears in new generations of your own. The most important thing to remember while writing is to put reference pages separate following the format of the work. As a writer who keenly observes ethics, one should always acknowledge the text source immediately after generating an idea (Roig, 47).
A responsible ethical writer is also advised to avoid extensive quotation to reduce infringements that result from copyrights. This means that writers who do intensive research publication or authors in various writing industries should be well versed with infringement laws. Further, in case of recycling of various articles, intensive paraphrasing is important to avoid the use of original words. In addition to these, ethical writers should regularly consult or borrow ideas from the original text to congruently present the intended meaning t...