Blog #3

When using others work to aid and better our own, it’s crucial to give credit it where its due. Without the proper acknowledgement, our pieces would be plagiarized. Plagiarism is taking ones’ ideas and work and passing it off as our own by failing to credit the source from which we got the material from. Plagiarizing can result in serious consequences for people of any age at any level that often lead them to losing their credibility in all future works. Not to worry, there are steps and guidelines that, if followed properly, ensure you’ll avoid being caught in a sticky plagiarism situation. One important thing to do is keep your own ideas and thoughts separate from others that you find in outside sources. If you write down your ideas in the same place you write down others ideas, when looking back at them it’s very possible you won’t remember what was your own idea versus others. In turn, you may end up plagiarizing because you thought an idea was yours that wasn’t. Another common error people make is not writing down their sources while they are looking at them. Often after doing a plethora of research, people look back at their notes and can’t remember what information came from what source, leaving them unable to cite their source properly. Speaking of citing sources, it’s important to keep a bibliography of all your sources. This enables you to give credit and, if questioned, point exactly to where you got any information from. A bibliography can be made even better by annotating it. By annotating it, you are summarizing exactly what information you got from the source, further clarifying what information did and did not come directly from your mind. Of course this isn’t a complete list of precautions to take, but it’s a start to being a good writer and avoiding plagiarism.