5 WAYS TO AVOID PLAGIARISM

 5 WAYS TO AVOID PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism—using someone else's words or ideas in writing without proper attribution—is one of the easiest ways to destroy your academic or professional reputation. Just ask Senator John Walsh, whose master's degree from the United States War College was revoked after he was found to have copied large parts of his thesis without crediting the source. Or Benny Johnson, the BuzzFeed writer who was fired after Twitter users pointed out dozens of examples in his articles of "sentences or phrases copied verbatim from other sites."

As a law student, it is especially important to be conscientious about avoiding plagiarism, as a plagiarism violation could be used as evidence of poor "character and fitness" when applying for admission to the bar. For practicing lawyers, plagiarism can be grounds for professional discipline. Once you've made a commitment to avoid plagiarism in your writing, put your commitment into practice by remembering these five basic tips on how to avoid plagiarism:

1. Use direct quotes - or don't quote at all

Sometimes in your research you come across a passage that makes a point so eloquently that you can't imagine saying it any other way. There is nothing wrong with copying such statements in your writing, but be careful how you do it. Simply adding a citation to a source is not enough; you must also put the copied language in quotes. Without quotation marks, you give the reader the impression that you wrote the passage yourself.

2. Paraphrase carefully

Don't assume that you can get away with using quotation marks just because you're not copying the entire original passage verbatim. At Seton Hall Law, we define plagiarism as copying 15 or more consecutive words without using quotation marks. This means that when you paraphrase a long passage and leave any 15 consecutive words unchanged from the original, you must enclose those words in quotation marks. Keep in mind that 15 words can be less than one sentence.

3. Give credit where credit is due

Even if you forget to put quotation marks around any copied passage of 15 words or more, you can still commit plagiarism if you rely on someone else's words or ideas without giving that person credit.

For example, suppose you are writing an article about the American legal system and come across a web page with the following passage: “In the American legal system, litigants are generally responsible for paying their own attorneys' fees, regardless of the outcome of the case. This means that people who cannot afford to hire a lawyer can effectively be denied access to justice.”

In your paper you write: "People who don't have enough money to hire lawyers are effectively denied access to justice in America because litigants are generally required to pay their own lawyers regardless of which side wins the case."

You have successfully paraphrased the original sentence, so no quotation marks are needed. However, you still need to cite the original source to make it clear to the reader that this is not your personal insight, but rather someone else's.

4. Beware of cutting and gluing

When doing Internet research, it's easy to get into the habit of cutting and pasting snippets of useful information into a text document and then using that document as the basis for writing your first draft. This is very dangerous because you can inadvertently confuse your original text with material that has been copied.

If you must cut and paste, be careful to enclose any copied material in quotation marks and clearly credit the source.

Even better, put any text you've cut and pasted in a different color or font than your own original font so you can easily see what's yours and what's someone else's.

5. Interim footnote

Even if you're just writing a rough draft, it's a good idea to include footnotes—at least one per paragraph, and ideally more.

The purpose of these footnotes is not to provide perfectly formatted citation information—that can wait until later—but rather to provide enough background information to remind you of the sources you used. Do not use terms like "id" at this stage. or "there". for referencing previous citations; instead, put the name of the sources in each footnote so that you remember where the material came from, even if you move sentences around later.

If you follow these simple steps, you won't have to worry about unintentionally committing plagiarism. Additionally, you'll likely find that the quality of your writing improves when you make a concerted effort to speak in your own voice and not someone else's.

Think you might want to refer to this information again? Download our one-page guide on ways to avoid plagiarism so you always have this information at your fingertips!