How to avoid plagiarism in academic writing

[Applause] oh my god okay what's up smart students welcome to today's video actually welcome to this series shall i say where we're talking all about paraphrasing previous video we learned this six different types of plagiarism now what i need to do is tell you guys the most common mistakes people make intentionally or not when it comes to plagiarizing and then i'm going to give you my three four i don't remember how many but i have a number of surefire tips and tricks strategies that are gonna help you avoid plagiarism every single time let's see if

i can slide out of here a little better let's go [Music] all right so let's start with the mistakes mistake number one is probably the most common and that is not paraphrasing correctly but including an in-text citation and considering yourself safe so here's the thing if you don't paraphrase correctly even if you include a citation it's going to be considered plagiarized material now mistake number two you understand mistake number one and you're trying to paraphrase correctly a mistake you might make here is only reading the immediate passage and then trying to paraphrase that topic so

for example let's say you're trying to talk about what a customer relationship management system is a crm system is and so you just read the definitional paragraph about it and then you go try and talk about what it is in your paper guess what you're gonna have a really hard time writing a paraphrase passage about what a crm is it's kind of important that you understand who it's for how it's used what it's made up of so don't be afraid to read around just the portion that you're trying to paraphrase go ahead and increase your

understanding of the topic because that's going to ensure that you paraphrase correctly but now mistake number three let's say you don't have time to read extra material and you kind of just need to get the material down on your paper right now here's a mistake that a lot of students make and that is using at the source to intentionally change a few of the words and then considering themselves safe so i actually recommend using a this source when you're paraphrasing but you still need to change the wording of the entire sentence you can't just change

a couple words in that sentence and then try and pass it off as your own idea because quite frankly you're still just using that source's material now it's just a little bit different so that is still going to be considered plagiarism but now the final common mistake that students make when it comes to plagiarism is changing the original meaning of the source so i don't mean changing the entire thing generally but you tweak it a little bit so for example you read an article it is almost a slam dunk for what you need in your

paper so say you fib the results a little bit or you fib the i don't know the demographics they're talking about whatever the case may be you change it just a little bit so that it better fits your paper or better suits your needs again this is a mistake because in order to use that original sources ideas thoughts in your paper you can't change what they wrote about in theirs you do need to paraphrase it but you can't change the meaning if that makes sense but now let's go ahead and talk about those actionable things

you can do to avoid plagiarism starting with the first one and that is paraphrasing or directly quoting correctly now here's the thing i didn't start with this because i'm sure if you're watching this video you already kind of know that you need to paraphrase so it's kind of common knowledge but it's worth reiterating here because it's important that you understand that you have to do that correctly that is the number one safe way that you'll avoid plagiarism and i already kind of touched on this in the mistakes but it's worth mentioning here in order to

paraphrase correctly to avoid plagiarism one of the best things you can do is to always improve your understanding of what you're trying to paraphrase i say this time and time again but if you feel like you're struggling you know that feeling of i kind of understand what i'm supposed to say i'm trying to paraphrase it on paper but it's just not working it's because you don't understand the topic you're trying to paraphrase think about something you know a lot about how easy is it for you to talk about versus something you don't know anything about

it's really hard for your brain to formalize words and so researching is no different effective research is about improving your understanding because that's how you're going to translate it from your mind down onto that piece of paper but let's go ahead and move on to the next tip which is to keep track of your sources this is going to depend on how advanced you are on paraphrasing or even how complex your assignment is so a lot of times if you're doing a lot of research and you're reading through tons and tons of articles and sources

sometimes it's best to go ahead and keep researching keep reading but keep track of your sources so that way when you are writing your paper later you know exactly what came from where because if you cite the wrong source in the wrong place it doesn't matter it's still plagiarism and as i've said before intentional or unintentional the punishment is still the same so keep track of your sources cover your bases that's key now the next tip i'd like to offer you is actually from my own personal toolbox i like to call it cite as you

write and so basically what this is is as you're researching you're writing your paper simultaneously and this is what i did for every single paper so you have a list of objectives you're trying to fulfill i would focus on the first one i would research i would write it i would cite it and then i'd move on to the next one and the next one and the next one and so this is something that i will say if you're not used to doing let's say you research your paper in its entirety and then you go

back and write it may take a little bit of or a little bit of transitional period to cite as you write but this is something that i try and teach students because i find it's very effective if i write a piece of paraphrase material i put that citation immediately in my paper the reference list entry included because that's going to save me time later on by the way let me know if you'd be interested in a video on that simply how i used to research and write a paper a lot of people we all use

different methods and so sometimes it helps to see how someone else does it to realize that your system maybe could be a little more efficient and so let me know if you want to see that anyways moving on to the last strategy you can use to avoid plagiarism and that is to use a plagiarism checker so there are software's systems online that you can quite literally run your papers through to see how high your paper scores on the plagiarism scale spoiler but your professor is going to do the same thing later when they grade you

because quite frankly when they do mark you off for plagiarism they're not trying to be hard on you it's that they generally run your papers through that plagiarism checker and if it scores too high they have to count you off there's there's really nothing they can do and so as a rule of thumb i always say you want to keep your plagiarism score in the single digits so in other words when you get to 10 and higher you want to start fixing some problems you want to go back and see what you did incorrectly underneath

that is fine because quite frankly there's always going to be a little form of plagiarism in all papers or at least a plagiarism checker is going to find some so keep in mind that it's okay in the single digits double digits you need to fix some stuff and here we are if i could summarize this entire video in one sentence or a phrase it would be this guys use a plagiarism checker when you're getting used to paraphrasing use a plagiarism checker it will help you but anyways thanks so much for watching this video all the

way through and by the way youtube has this awesome new feature called youtube thanks which allows you guys to support your creators let them know what videos you like which ones you're learning the most from what type of videos you want more from whatever the case may be you can find that down where you like the video subscribe all that good stuff which you should do while you're out while you're down there if you haven't already too but anyways guys i will see you in the next video