What is Plagiarism?

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Plagiarism is the act of using the works of another person in the form of context, ideas, graphical illustrations e.t.c as your own. When you use someone else's work in any form without giving credit to the person you have just performed plagiarism.

This act of plagiarism is fraudulent because what you are essentially doing is stealing someone else's intellectual property. Now, when someone makes a context whether in the form of text, images, videos, music, e.t.c that person has created a property with his intellect.

So if you go ahead to make use of it or any part of it without crediting the person, you have just stolen from that person's intellectual property.

Plagiarism is illegal and against ethics as it infringes on another writer’s work, which often has the copyright and the trademark of that particular write-up or work. It also gives them ownership of them for that work. Thus, copying something from other’s work without giving proper accreditation to them is morally unethical, and legally too. Source

There are different types of plagiarism which people do differently. We shall be looking into some of them.

Types of plagiarism

1. Direct Plagiarism:

This is a plagiarism where you copy someone else's work word for word or precept by precept without giving any source as to where the information is derived from.

2. Self Plagiarism:

This is a plagiarism where an individual copies most of his former works and uses it in his present work without citing the former work.

3. Accidental Plagiarism:

If an author or a writer neglects to cite their sources, unintentionally paraphrases or some other work without attribution then the writer commits plagiarism. It is Accidental plagiarism and even though the word accidental is attached to it, this form of plagiarism is also given equal importance compared to any other form of plagiarism. Source

4. Paraphrasing:

This is a type of plagiarism where a writer copies some ideas behind a sentence or tries to change the structure behind a sentence and not cite the source where he gets the sentence from.

5. Mosaic Plagiarism:

This is a type of plagiarism where an author makes use of words that are synonymous to the words where the information is derived from without properly citing the work. It is commonly done by students in secondary and tertiary levels.

Avoiding Plagiarism

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When creating our works, be it text or images or any other form of work we can get tempted to plagiarise by copying some other person's work and failing to cite the person's work.

To avoid plagiarism, first we need to have adequate knowledge about plagiarism as this will help us perform our work in a morally and legally upright standard.

However, without the knowledge of Plagiarism we can simply cite people's work at the places where the citation is needed. This will prevent us from falling into the hands of plagiarism even if we don't know about it.

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