4 Clear and effective writing
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Avoiding plagiarism
Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work and passing it off as your own.
In other words, when you plagiarise you fail to acknowledge the sources of those
ideas that are not your own. This is one of the most serious offences you can
commit as an academic and the punishment can consequently be severe. If your
examiners feel you have a case to answer, you will probably be asked to explain
yourself formally to a committee and you may be downgraded or even fail your
dissertation or thesis should the committee determine that you are guilty of
plagiarism.
What is particularly sad about many plagiarism cases is that they are, in fact,
unintentional. Either because they come from an educational culture with different
academic writing conventions and/or a different perspective on the citing of others’
work, or because they simply forget to acknowledge a source, students often sub-
mit their work unaware of what they’ve done and the reaction it will provoke.
Another problem is that some find it difficult to know when an idea is somebody
else’s and when it’s their own. This tends to happen when they’ve taken another
scholar’s idea and either developed it in some way or applied it in a completely dif-
ferent context to that in which it was originally proposed. Unfortunately, whatever
the reason, a plagiarism committee will not be interested in it; they will consider it
a case of plagiarism regardless of whether it was deliberate or not. So beware!
The main way to avoid accusations of plagiarism is to be attentive to the origins
of your ideas, meticulous in the way you record your sources (
➨
see p. 75) and
comprehensive with your in-text referencing, the focus of our next sub-section.
Referencing and quotations
As we saw earlier, if we are to add credibility to our ideas while also avoiding accu-
sations of plagiarism, one key way in which we do this is by citing other reputable
sources. Sometimes we may simply mention another scholar’s theory of the
idea and/or paraphrase it, and sometimes we may wish to quote that scholar.
In both cases, a reference needs to be provided, and it needs to be correctly
formatted.
Why is it so important to provide references and to format them correctly? Because
it enables the reader to (a) understand the provenance of the ideas you are borrow-
ing, and (b) to locate and read them, should they wish to do so. The reader’s ability
to locate and read any sources you cite is important, not only because it gives them
the opportunity to understand more fully those ideas and the context in which they
originally appeared, but because it allows them to determine whether or not you
have represented them accurately. In-text references should therefore have the
author’s surname, the year of publication of the work being cited, and the relevant
page numbers on which the quotation appears.
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