I. OVERVIEW
Plagiarism is unacceptable behaviour in the field of education. The penalties for plagiarism are quite severe, regardless of the country or region. To ensure that your academic performance is a true reflection of your knowledge, the following will provide you with some suggestions and solutions on how to avoid plagiarism in your paper.
II. Suggestions to avoid plagiarism
2.1 Read the primary literature thoroughly
Before writing an academic paper, you should study the original research thoroughly to understand its main points and the empirical data supporting them. In-depth study will help you better understand the ideas and principles of the original work, thus enabling you to present original ideas and arguments.
2.2 Shifting language expressions
During the writing process, you can try to transform others’ arguments into your own language. It is not necessary to copy the original text, but you can refer to other expressions in the system, such as making up storylines and changing tenses to reflect your personal independent thinking skills. However, do not over-adapt; the professor wants to see your unique insights.
2.3 Cite the source when quoting
In addition to quoting others’ ideas in your paper, you need to indicate the details of all the quotes in the text. This not only helps to avoid plagiarising the work of others, but also shows your respect and knowledge of the relevant literature. The way of citation should be in line with academic norms, and it is best to quote others directly.
2.4 Use synonym replacement
Wherever possible, find synonyms to replace key words and phrases that have been used to give your paper more variety. Obtain alternative words by using a dictionary, searching online or asking your tutor.
2.5 Flexible use of graphical forms
During the writing process, graphs and tables can be used to present data, thus reducing the amount of text in the essay and lowering the repetition rate.
2.6 Use professional weight checking tools
At the end of the writing process, professional checking tools such as “Turnitin” and “HeLioblast” can be used to review and find out the fragments with too high repetition rate, so as to further improve the quality of the dissertation.
III. Brief introduction of weight checking tools
3.1 Turnitin
Turnitin is a widely used software for checking English academic literature, with high accuracy and fast update speed. The software can not only find text repetition, but also find out similar or identical sentence structure.
3.2 HeLioblast
Similar to Turnitin, HeLioblast is also characterised by high accuracy and frequent upgrades. It is more capable of handling Chinese documents.
IV. Conclusion
To deal with plagiarism, we should uphold a rigorous and pragmatic attitude to improve our academic quality and responsibility. At the same time, we should strengthen our own academic ethics to avoid plagiarism and plagiarism. I hope the above suggestions can help you and wish you good luck!
