Plagiarism

Well since we are talking about Plagiarism, let's first define it. Plagiarism, outside of the academic world would be considered breach of copyright, and is addressed in the court system. Within the academic community, plagiarism, is one of the most serious offenses one can ever do, short of running around campus without any clothes off. Normally plagiarism warrants some sort of punishment ranging from an F on the assignment, to an F for the entire course, to even a suspension or expulsion from an institution. Plagiarism normally falls into to different categories. The first category being that the student deliberately misrepresents the work as their own when in fact the work is, totally or in part, the copyrighted work of someone else. These individuals are rightly termed as plagiarists. The second category is when a student fails to handle copyrighted material properly within their written assignments. These situations or dealt with usually by showing the student what they had done wrong, and making sure that they understand how they had plagiarized in the first place. Plagiarism is avoided by giving the appropriate credit to whoever one cites information from. You do this by using certain formats and guidelines when you write your paper. There are many different kinds of formats, such as APA and MLA but one most commonly used would be MLA format, which stands for Modern Language Association. As long as information used in ones paper, including information from online sources, one can avoid having plagiarism in his paper.