A Step-by-Step Guide to Remove Plagiarism While Writing Essay
Plagiarism is the act of copying someone’s content and presenting it as your own without giving them the due credit. It is not only considered unethical but it can have negative consequences for you and your essay.
Since you are using someone else’s words or ideas in your essay, you must always acknowledge where they came from. Keeping this aside though, plagiarism can occur for two main reasons. It can be intentional or accidental.
Accidental plagiarism can occur in your essay when the information you’ve put in it resembles one that is already present on the internet.
Since there is an abundance of information available on the internet about everything, there’s a chance your essay might have accidental plagiarism.
Plagiarism, if caught in your essay can lead to the teacher having a negative perception about you. It can also cause havoc on your grades, resulting in poor academic performance.
But there are a few steps you can take to get across this issue. If you want to know what these steps are, stick with us till the end as we’ll be giving a step-by-step guide on how to remove plagiarism from your essay. So let’s get started, shall we?
Step 1: Citing Sources
Plagiarized content includes words, ideas, or thoughts of another person. To avoid this, you can cite its source.
Citing sources refers to acknowledging that the given piece of content belongs to someone else. It can also help the reader identify the original source of an information, idea, or text.
Citations can be added in multiple formats. You can choose the format that suits you the best by taking a look at this list of samples from each of the formats or by following the guidelines (if any) that are given to you by your institution.
After the format is chosen, sources are usually cited in the body of the essay, right next to the borrowed information, and by making a list of references at the end of the essay. The citations included in the body are known as in-text citations.
Here’s an example of an in-text citation according to APA 7th format.
Try and add a citation to every piece of information that you’ve borrowed in your essay. This will credit the original author of the source and it will not count as plagiarized content.
Keep in mind that adding citations to your essay can only be helpful for removing a small amount of plagiarism. This brings us to our next step.
Step 2: Adding Quotations
Adding quotation marks (“”) to a piece of text that is taken from an external source can be a great way to cleanse your essay of plagiarism. They are not only limited to sayings but can be added to any piece of information that you have to quote in your essay.
Quotations are required to be written exactly as the author has written or uttered them. You can use this to your advantage though.
If you really like a piece of information and want to keep it in your essay, you can just go ahead and write it in its original form and add quotation marks to it.
Additionally, you can also add something like ‘According to’ and the author’s name before giving the quotation. This can help the reader understand that a quotation is about to come up.
For example, if you’re writing an essay on global warming and want to make the reader realize that global warming is currently in effect. Rather than saying global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.
Try and say, according to James Hansen “Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.”
But remember, you should keep the number of quotations in your essay to a minimum because essays require you to put forth your own arguments.
Apart from this, if you add too many quotations to your essay, the teacher might think that you’re borrowing every idea and couldn’t come up with any of your own.
Step 3: Utilizing a Plagiarism Remover
Since you can’t add too many quotations to your essay and adding citations can only work to fix a small amount of plagiarism.
What can you do to remove a huge amount of plagiarism from your essay? Well, this is where the third and final step comes in.
You can use an online plagiarism remover to eliminate any amount of plagiarism that might be occurring in your essay.
Plagiarism removers use AI to change the sentence structure and swap words for their alternatives.
This in turn can make your essay plagiarism-free. Simply copy and paste the elements from your essay that are plagiarized and let the tool do its thing.
Conclusion
When grading essays, teachers usually take into account whether it includes plagiarism or not. A high amount of Remove Plagiarism in your essay can lead to bad grades. To make sure this doesn’t happen, we have listed a few steps in this article that you can take to make your essay plagiarism-free(Remove Plagiarism).