Time Bound: Escaping from Plagiarizing

One way to tell if you are committing plagiarism in writing a research-based article or even an opinion piece is in the number of sources you are using: too few or only one; and the time you spend on the source.

Unless you are critiquing something, if you spend so much time writing on the ideas contained in one book or one source, chances are you are plagiarizing.

Is the book open by your desktop computer? How long? How many sentences have you copied? How many paragraphs?

Remember that long quotes taken from a published source is considered plagiarism - which is why the emphasis on time. Are you copying too much material from one source and staying there too long? You have to use your own words in such a way that you don’t steal other people’s ideas. In research, it is called “collecting others’ flowers” and that’s not acceptable.

Let’s say you use the dictionary or the thesaurus for synonyms of every word written in the paragraph so that they become yours. Do they really become yours? Absolutely not! Neither is re-arranging the words in a sentence of some source.

The safest way out is to tackle topics that you are familiar with. And the closest to familiarization is studying the subject with as many sources as possible. The variety can give enough angles from which to view your topic. Then you can have a tenable grasp of it rather than a tunnel vision from one source or a few.

Because you now have a wider perspective, you can escape plagiarizing. It will be easier to use your own words rather than hinge on someone’s – word for word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. More yet, your knowledge has grown on the subject, and what you write can contribute to the knowledge of others. It is because you can now add to what was already written, even if by way of affirming some aspect or negating some. You then have activated some continuing debate.

But if you simply copy, there’s no addition made but just a subtraction – from you! Plagiarized materials don’t contribute anything. They destroy the character of the one producing them.