Plagiarism

Plagiarism

Plagiarism
While a group of kids are hanging out, one boy says a joke, but not loud enough for most of the others to hear. One of his friends hears it and repeats it, causing the rest of his friends to laugh hysterically. The kid who said the joke in the first place gets angry, because those were his words. This is an example of plagiarism. Plagiarism is similar to stealing, but can be avoided by a lot of ways such as using quotes, paraphrasing, and summarizing.
Plagiarism is “presenting another person’s words, ideas, or visual images as if they were your own” (Troyka 227). Plagiarism is simply stealing an author’s words and not giving them credit. This includes oneself. “Self-plagiarism is still a kind of plagiarism and should be avoided” (Wywanitkit). Plagiarism is usually when a person steals an author’s written words, but can also happen when using what somebody says, or even just taking a person’s idea. It is a serious offense and can cause a student to fail a class, or possibly even have them expelled from the school. Students should take caution when writing a paper and use one of the many tactics to avoid plagiarizing.
Using Quotations is one of the more simple ways to avoid plagiarizing. This method is just taking the authors words, putting quotation marks around them, and giving the author credit. “Directly quoted material surrounded by quotation marks or indented as block quotes and cited to the original source is not considered plagiarism.”(Shultz) The biggest thing to make sure of when using a quotation is that the words are in the exact same order as the original author’s, because if they are not it is still plagiarism. This method is most often used when there is no way to re-word it, or when it would be better to use a professional’s words, or if it would be more powerful to use the original phrase.
Another way to avoid plagiarizing is to paraphrase the author’s words. A paraphrase rewords what the author had originally written (Troyka). It...

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