How to Write Original Papers Without Academic Cheating

In this article, we decided to tell you how to save a lot of time writing academic papers. If you have problems with writing assignments, you don’t need to copy content from the internet in hope that nobody will notice plagiarism. We are going to tell you how to write dozens of pages every day without any consequences associated with academic dishonesty.

Focus on Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusion

If you take a look at academic papers written by professional scholars, you will notice that abstracts and introductions contain a lot of useful information. There are many important terms that describe ideas essential for the entire paper. Moreover, the abstract is a chapter that sums up the whole work, being less than one page long. Every article has its key idea, which is called a thesis. Being based on a single idea, the whole paper just describes details and explains the background of the research.

Most articles have short abstracts which are less than 120 words long. It turns out that it’s quite enough to explain the general meaning of the whole article. You can also compare the abstract with the introduction. These two sections usually contain a lot of similar information. The reason is that articles published in scientific journals are analyzed by many scholars so their key idea must be perfectly explained from different angles. This is also a reason why academic papers are so boring.

Even the most dedicated students may fall asleep when reading endless research papers. However, professors know that you don’t need to read the whole article. Sometimes it’s enough to look over the abstract to understand what the whole article is about, in fact, everything else is just details. The truth is, the very purpose of an abstract is to let scholars get a grasp on the general meaning of the article with no need to actually read it.

Take a look at the introduction, read it, and write one sentence about the key idea of this paragraph. Most often, the thesis statement is presented in the last sentence of the introductory paragraph. Now skip the rest of the paper and read the conclusion. The conclusion will help you get acquainted with the results of the research. It is not a research paper, the conclusion may contain the author’s most important comments. Some students lose their self-confidence when they read long articles, while in fact, they don’t need to dig into details of the research unless they want to completely replicate it. The most important information always lies on the surface.

No matter what paper you want to use, the introduction will likely contain all the information you need to properly cite the article in your own work. It will show you what was the reason for a research, the main topic, methods that were used, main findings, and what possible applications of these results are important for a certain area of knowledge.

We hope you followed our advice and wrote a sentence about the main idea of the introduction. You don’t need to stop at this point, just keep paraphrasing useful sentences of the introduction and conclusion, quickly writing a summary of the original paper. This is all you need to analyze its ideas and provide an original view.

Plagiarism

There are many definitions of plagiarism. Scholars distinguish several common types of plagiarism but all of them agree that this problem means using someone else’s information without giving credit to the original author. Plagiarism may be caused by many different reasons and so lead to different consequences.

The first type of plagiarism is the most dangerous. It implies using somebody else’s ideas in your paper intentionally and presenting those thoughts as your own. All the professors agree that such a type of plagiarism is completely inexcusable. This applies to both previously published articles and papers written by other students. You can mention only facts that are considered common knowledge and express your own opinion.

Another type of plagiarism is less dangerous. it’s especially common among undergraduate students. Sometimes, students make mistakes using MLA or APA citation styles. For example, they may correctly include citations in one paragraph but forget about them in another paragraph. In this case, a professor will likely point out the mistake and suggest that you fix it.

If you use information from a certain source in your paper and then cite another source, it is also considered plagiarism and inappropriate citation. In this case, professors will likely understand that it was an unintentional mistake and not a serious offense. On the other hand, there are students who attempt to write the whole paper by using pieces of information from random sources and then citing those random sources in a random order. In this case, it will be considered cheating for sure. Honestly, most professors don’t want to waste their time searching for all sources used in your paper and checking all citations. Nevertheless, they check all papers using plagiarism software and you never know what part of your paper will be checked by a professor. There’s no chance you can convince a professor that you stole somebody else’s ideas accidentally.

Finally, the last type of plagiarism is using quotes from the internet and pasting them without quotation marks. This is still considered plagiarism and such elements will be always flagged by plagiarism-checking software. Of course, you can do it accidentally but you don’t need any plagiarized content in your article or research paper.

What If I Get Caught on Plagiarism?

Sometimes students submit papers that contain plagiarized content pasted from books and articles written by somebody else. It’s easy to find any sources online, and it’s also easy to forget the rules of citation. Such students are usually accused of academic dishonesty, and the consequences of submitting an unoriginal paper may even involve exclusion from a degree program. However, we already mentioned that plagiarism may have completely different reasons. For example, sometimes students may forget which draft if the final one and accidentally submit one of their first drafts.

The point is that plagiarism isn’t necessarily intentional, and professors need to deal with this fact. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you can always lie about the wrong draft and avoid the consequences of plagiarism. Even if a professor believes you and you won’t get expelled, you will still need to resubmit the right paper. There’s no way you can just paste content from the web and get away with it.

However, if it’s your case and you just forgot to submit the right draft, you must know about the solution. Just keep in mind that you will need to quickly provide the right, 100% original version.

Academic Writing: Is It Original?

Let’s be honest, there’s nothing original in this world. People were writing down their ideas for thousands of years and they always used each other’s thoughts, in one way or another.

Furthermore, when professors ask you to write an academic paper, they don’t expect you to present something completely new. They want you to use articles that were already published in various journals, as well as other information that can be found in databases and libraries. You just need to cite them properly, following rules of the required citation style. Thus, you need to find good articles in a library or in some of the online databases, and make sure these articles are relevant, interesting, and directly related to your topic. There’s too much information in Google, so there’s no surprise if you have problems with searching for reliable journal articles. Here is a simple tip for you: When you need to google some topic, for example, “the first amendment,” search for “the first amendment journal articles.”

It’s easy to find a lot of information on the internet, but it’s not so easy to understand whether you can use it or not. You need to use only peer-reviewed articles written by professionals in a certain area. Thus, you need academic journals. The simple part is that such journals usually have the word “journal” in their names. You can always Google the name of the chosen publication and determine where it comes from. The main thing is to find feedback and make sure your sources are reliable.

You can also quickly filter the unnecessary sources. They usually contain such words as “magazine,” “today,” and “news.” You don’t need popular sources, your goal is to find sources intended for the academic audience only.

How to Paraphrase Properly

First, let’s clarify a very important issue: submitting original content and passing plagiarism checkers are completely different things. No matter how many ideas you have stolen from different books, as long as your paper shows a high score, it is considered original. All plagiarism checkers are searching for certain phrases, yet being unable to understand the meaning of your content and determine whether your ideas are stolen or not.

You can test any plagiarism checker by making the simple experiment: Paste a paragraph from any source, and rewrite it using the required citation style. After this, choose different synonyms and reverse sentences, changing the structure of the paragraph.

1. Add citations. It’s easy. Just check the manual of the required style and specify the author’s name and/or the year of publication. By adding citations, you give credit to the author so it cannot be considered plagiarism anymore.
2. Use synonyms. You need to paraphrase sentences in order to pass plagiarism checkers. You need to change words and reorganize phrases. In this case, you may benefit from choosing different synonyms. You can do it even in Microsoft Word or another text editor. Just right-click important words and look for synonyms that fit the context of your paper.
   You can do it with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Let’s say, you need to paraphrase this sentence: “Changing important words, you can make your text original.” We can easily transform it so it will look like this: “Altering significant words, you are able to make your text unique.”
3. Change the structure. You can easily change any sentence into something completely original. Changing the structure of your sentences is the best way to pass plagiarism checkers. However, it will still be considered academic dishonesty if you don’t cite the author. Paraphrase the sentence, and then add a proper citation in parentheses.
4. Add new words and change the content. Finally, don’t forget that you can add your own ideas. Not only will it make your paper more original, but also more meaningful.

So, now you have a completely original paper… or do you? If you don’t see plagiarism, it doesn’t mean that your paper is actually unique. Let’s see how to make sure your paper is indeed original.

1. Check your school database or library and search for articles in professional journals. Add “literature review” to your keywords.
2. Select several articles that are directly related to your topic. Make sure you choose only sources that are easy to understand because you need to know what you’re writing about. Reading sources, check the “Literature Review” sections.
3. Paste all articles and their reference lists into your document.
4. Delete all the content except abstracts, references, conclusions, and introductions.
5. Now start reading what you’ve got, and start writing in your own words anytime you see some interesting information. This is the basis for your document.
6. Every time you write any information that you found in one of those articles, include a citation. Check Literature Review sections for complete citations and change them according to the required citation style, if necessary.
7. Once you finished reading the first article, check the reference list and search for the name of every author that you used. Delete references that remain unused.
8. Read all articles and you will have sets of sentences from various sources. Read this raw material and figure out what your paper is about.
9. Add topic sentences to every set of sentences, so that every one of them will look like a meaningful paragraph focused on a certain subject. Topic sentences should describe the main idea of each paragraph and be related to the thesis statement presented in the introduction.
10. Move all references to the end of your paper.
11. Read and edit your draft several times, add your thoughts, and make sure your paper doesn’t contain any quotes and paraphrased sentences that don’t have citations. Write the conclusion.

Check our tips and try this method next time when you need to write an academic paper. We are sure that this approach can save a lot of time and help in using sources more effectively. In addition, you will get rid of plagiarism and learn to paraphrase articles and books properly.