Home Guides Art, Writing & Literature
College professors can really be a pain in the a**. They want papers you write to be original and on point. Now you might be saying, how can I write something original when almost everything in the world is already written?
How can I avoid being accused of copying what's in my essay before I have to turn it in tomorrow? Do you need academic writing help? Or can you do it yourself?
No worries, here's your guide to avoiding being accused of plagiarism by your teachers.
This sounds obvious. But many people just write without understanding the topic. It's important to do the research and understand the topic, even if that understanding is quite shallow. Not knowing about what you write is the perfect way to be accused of plagiarism - because then you would be just copying and pasting from sources.
Keep a list of the sources in your research. Write down these things - the author, the url, the name of the book, the page and copy and paste the relevant paragraphs you are citing from. This way, if you are accused, you have a great log of your writing and research process to back you up.
It's ok to quote, but be sure to indicate where you have quoted in your list of references. To correctly quote, enclose the sentence or paragraph or phrase within "quotes" and actually provide a reference to that quote in your footnotes, or in a link in the quote itself. Sometimes you cannot avoid quoting things, but you should minimize the amount of quoting you've done.
The core and "meat" of your essay has to be in your own words. But how can you do this? Write down a list of points you've collected earlier in your research, then expand upon them.
The list of points help you to organize and you can easily write multiple sentence or paragraphs for each point you've made.
This is the part that makes your essay unique.
Do not merely paraphrase away all your sources. Be sure to add a short section in the essay on your own opinion of it. The easiest way to do this is to explore in your mind how the topic affects your society or group.
For instance, if you were writing a paper about divorce, it would be good to also add a paragraph about how you saw divorce affecting some members of your family in personal terms as well.
No big deal, you can use a cheap essay writing service that's available online. They will ensure you get a plagiarism free essay.
Happy writing!