What is plagiarism and how can we avoid it?

Plagiarism is the act stealing work from another individual and taking the credit for it. According to the MLA Style Center, you are misleading the reader into thinking that someone’s work is your own and you are also stealing another person’s creative thoughts that took them actual time to work on. If you get caught plagiarizing, it can not only tarnish, but also possibly end your career as a writer. It will ruin your credibility and there is no way that anybody will want to work with you. If you take your friends work and reuse it, it’s plagiarism, if you take another person’s idea without crediting them, it’s plagiarism. Even if you choose to reuse ideas that you have used in the past, it’s still plagiarism. These are some forms of plagiarism and it goes to show that you can do it without even knowing it.  Some ways to prevent plagiarism are as follows, Create a list citing all sites used and use quotation marks where u took some information from. This will create a clear distinction that will separate what’s yours, and what’s another person’s work. When you change the words from a sentence that you took, this is still considered plagiarism. In order for this not to be plagiarism, “you should be changing the structure of the sentence”.  

All in all, it is not recommended that you plagiarize as it can have devastating effects to your career as a professional writer, and is a “form of theft”. Make sure that if you are using information found from the internet to quote it and cite the website you used. Don’t be a cheating slime-ball and write honestly!