Things to Know About Term Paper Plagiarism

Recent studies have found that at least one out of every three students uses the work of other people and claims it as his or her own. According to Syracuse University professor Rebecca Moore Howard, many observers have labeled this a "plagiarism epidemic." Though plagiarism has always been with us, the rise of the internet has made it easier and easier for college and university students to misuse research sources. This doesn't have to be on purpose. At least half the time students who plagiarize do so by accident.

This article will review the concept of plagiarism, explain how and why students find themselves falling into the plagiarism trap, and give you some potential solutions to keep your work academically honest and keep you out of trouble with the plagiarism police: i.e., your professors.

What Is Plagiarism?

Surprisingly, there is no one definition of plagiarism. In the most general sense, plagiarism is the use of other people's work as your own. Everyone agrees that copying someone else's work—whether a paragraph from a book or an entire article—and putting it in your paper word-for-word as though you wrote it yourself is plagiarism. The rule for this is very simple: You cannot copy other people's words without putting them in "quotation marks" and telling the reader who said them.

But experts differ on other ways of using other's people's work. Some think it is technically plagiarism if you tell readers what somebody else said but use wording and sentence structure that is too much like what the original writer said. Doing so is sometimes called "patchwriting," and it often happens when students are trying to understand difficult ideas and end up not being able to express them clearly in their own words. They unintentionally repeat what their sources say because they don't know any other way of expressing the ideas.

This seems a little confusing, but the idea is that you should always be writing your own work in your own words. This means that taking someone else's work and rewriting it by changing words around or using a thesaurus to find synonyms is plagiarism.

Finally, the last major type of plagiarism is the failure to acknowledge sources. Even if you write about other people's ideas in your own words, if you don't tell the reader where you found those ideas, you have stolen them and committed plagiarism. You must acknowledge the source of everything that is not common knowledge, usually with footnotes or parenthetical citations.

The Plagiarism Trap

Many students fall into the plagiarism trap by accident. If you are racing to finish your paper, you might accidentally forget a citation. Or, you might not realize that you have come too close to your source's language. This happens quite a bit when students are reading a source and trying to write about it at the same time. Sometimes we don't realize that we are transferring some of the source's words into our paper.

But the biggest plagiarism trap is the internet. Thanks to the internet, students can copy-and-paste material directly from online into their papers. But in doing so, it becomes far too easy to forget what was copied and to mistakenly use other people's writing as your own. In addition, some students believe that any text on the internet is "free" and can be "shared" in student papers. Unless you use "quotation marks" and acknowledge the source, you can't copy and paste text from the internet.

The Plagiarism Solution

Since it is so easy to accidentally plagiarize, many students have turned to services like The Paper Experts to provide them with strong, high-quality model term papers and essays to show them exactly how to approach a topic. When you order a model term paper or essay from The Paper Experts, you can rest assured that our papers are completely free from plagiarism.

Our model papers are written by academic experts who have been to graduate school and know exactly what universities and colleges require, and we follow the most rigorous standards of academic honesty. Earlier, we talked about cases where experts disagree whether something is plagiarism. We take no chances, and we never come anywhere near those ambiguous situations. We carefully acknowledge every source and use quotation and paraphrasing correctly every time.

At The Paper Experts we do more than other custom academic writing services. We begin by hiring only the most qualified academic writers, those with advanced degrees and years of experience producing academic work. Then, we send every paper to a quality control specialist who reviews it a second time to guarantee that the paper we send to you is completely free from plagiarism and is 100% original, high-quality academic work.

When you order from us, you can feel safe knowing that your model term paper or essay will not just show you how to write your paper but how to write it the right way: plagiarism-free.