What is plagiarism, and what are the repercussions?
Plagiarism has vastly been defined by many authors depending on the context of use. The objective of this paper is to identify plagiarism in the field of education and its repercussions. Plagiarism has been described as academic fraud or ‘thievery’. This act entails reproducing or paraphrasing another author’s intellectual material without acknowledging them. This act applies to published work as well as content downloaded from the internet. Webster’s online dictionary defines plagiarism as the act of stealing and owning ideas of another person without giving credit to the real source. Therefore, we cannot write work without citing the source of knowledge, or the author of the material used as this would be considered cheating.
Plagiarism can be in both written and non-written form and hence would include and not limited to unacknowledged imagery, photographs, diagrams, computer programs and motivational quotes. According to Pecorari (2013), some examples of plagiarism include; submitting a group project as your own without declaring that it was a collaboration, cutting and pasting material from directly the internet, including another person’s extracts without using quotation marks and proper acknowledgement and so forth.
According to the law, plagiarism is a breach of the moral rights of authors and is punishable by law. Therefore, authors can take legal action if whole or part of their work was not attributed to them or if it was done but to a different source. In learning institutions, plagiarism leads to disciplinary action as it is considered as academic misconduct and may lead to expulsion. The invention of software, for example, turn it in and plagiarism checker by Grammarly have much helped in checking for any form of plagiarism in any piece of work. In conclusion, writers must adhere to the rules of writing to avoid punishment and confiscation of their work.
References
- Pecorari, D. (2008) Academic writing and plagiarism: A linguistic analysis. Continuum, London.
- Pecorari, D. (2013). Teaching to avoid plagiarism. Open University Press.
- Webster’s online dictionary. (2004), from merriam-webster.com