Plagiarism in Academic Writing: Understanding the Different Types and Arguments

This research paper discusses the different types of plagiarism, including direct, paraphrase, and mosaic plagiarism. It also sheds light on the arguments surrounding accidental plagiarism in academic writing and the role of professors in helping students prevent plagiarism.

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Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Plagiarism can be defined as the act of using the work of other authors without giving
credit to the contributions of the author. Claiming the work of others under one’s own name is
considered the act of intellectual dishonesty and often results in severe consequences. The act of
plagiarism can violate the honor codes of a university and can cause irreparable damage to the
reputation of the person (Ocholla & Ocholla, 2016). A plagiarized assignment might lead to a
failing grade as well as suspension and even expulsion. There are indeed arguments among
stalwarts over the facts that not all act as of plagiarism is intentional and often students get
engaged in accidental plagiarism that are not done deliberately. While many professionals
consider situation before penalizing students while others are strict on punishing the individuals
for their committed wrong (Ctl.yale.edu , 2016). Hence, the essay would be discussing different
aspect of plagiarism along with shedding light more light on the arguments that exist on this
topic.
Before discussing in details about the arguments on the topic, it is very important to
discuss about the different types of plagiarism that a student might conduct. One of them is the
direct plagiarism. This can be explained as the act of copying the work of another person word
for word. Students are seen to insert a paragraph or sentence into their own writing from a book
or research paper without including attribution or marks of quotation is termed as direct
plagiarism. Another type is called the paraphrase plagiarism (Eisa et al., 2017). This is seen to
involve making of few changes to another individual’s work and then claiming it to be own.
Researchers are of the opinion that unless an idea is a common knowledge, an individual cannot
include the information in their own paper without any citation. Another form of plagiarism is
the mosaic plagiarism. This is seen to be a combination of the direct plagiarism and paraphrase

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plagiarism. The students are mainly seen to toss various words, sentences and even phrases into
the essay without providing any attributes or quotation marks.
He most controversial and debatable concept is “accidental plagiarism”. This is mainly
seen to occur when citations are missing or when the sources are not cited correctly. Accidental
plagiarism is seen to result from a disorganized research procedure as well as due to last-minute
time crunch. “When students accidentally fail to cite the sources correctly, they are considered to
be having conducted plagiarism even when the intention of giving credit was present but was
forgotten unintentionally” (Packer et al., 2014). Therefore, this had raised argument about why
such students would accept the same fate as that of the students who have deliberately conducted
plagiarism. The similar students are also seen to be penalized and even some of the universities
cancel their assignment paper giving scope of making the assignment afresh. Other universities
might result in temporary suspension of the students and might even take very strict steps of
making the student fail that year or permanent termination (Davies & Howard, 2015).
Often broad ended interviews conducted with participants have revealed the main
scenarios that result in accidental plagiarism by the students. Many of the students were seen to
follow a similar practice. They read the article and write the paper at the same time. They types
notes into their paper with the thought that they would go back and paraphrase the information
later. However, when they come back later to edit that portion, they forget what they wrote and
what they had copied from the research article or other sources (Harris, 2017). In such cases they
had to start over their paper again, as they could not realize what was needed to be kept and what
was needed to be thrown away. Sometimes, students who do not want to do it afresh, takes
chances and this can lead to accidental plagiarism. The argument here is that the student had
tried his best and had worked hard to write the paper but the work still had caused plagiarism

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without the real motive of the student. Such issues need to be identified by professors and need
to be considered, as the entire hard work would go in vain for this student dooming his life
without intentional fault.
Another accidental plagiarism might result when students fail to provide the correct
sources in the correct places or miss the incorporation of sources in the important adopted ideas.
Many of the authors have shown evidences that accidental plagiarism might take place when
there is a lack of understanding of paraphrasing in the students and not being clear about the
parameters of common knowledge (Sahi & Gupta, 2016). They might also have no idea about
the statute of limitations on the attributions of ideas. Many stalwarts are of the opinion that rules
of attributes are culturally determined and much of unintentional plagiarism can be the result of
writers not understanding the sanctity by which academics endow the concept of ownership
(Canzonetta & Kannan, 2016). Therefore these lack of versatilities and skills among the students
cannot become the contributing factors to them face penalties, failures and termination from their
academic year. Therefore, there is often an argument about the role of professors in helping
students to develop important skills to help them prevent plagiarism. Hence, the jury and
decision making committees should give scopes to students to explain their sides of justification
and try to judge the cause of the students’ submission of plagiarized content.
From the above discussion, it can be understood that plagiarism is indeed a discrete
offence that should be punishable. Although, there are many students who conduct plagiarism
due to laziness, to score high marks or due to procrastination of their work to the last minutes,
many students who do not conduct the crime deliberately. It is the duty of the jury or the decision
makers to give the cope to the student to justify their feelings and to judge whether the

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plagiarism done was due to lack of skills or not. This would help in saving the future of many
students who work quite hard to develop their career and do not take the help of forgery.

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References:
Canzonetta, J., & Kannan, V. (2016). Globalizing Plagiarism & Writing Assessment: A Case
Study of Turnitin. The Journal of Writing Assessment, 9.
Ctl.yale.edu (2016) What is plagiarism? Yale Centre Of Learning (online) Retrieved from:
https://ctl.yale.edu/writing/using-sources/understanding-and-avoiding-plagiarism/what-
plagiarism (accessed on 15 November, 2018)
Davies, L. J. P., & Howard, R. M. (2015). Plagiarism and the internet: fears, facts, and
pedagogies. handbook of academic integrity, 1-13.
Eisa, T., Salim, N., & Alzahrani, S. (2017). Figure Plagiarism Detection Using Content-Based
Features. In Recent Developments in Intelligent Computing, Communication and
Devices (pp. 17-20). Springer, Singapore.
Harris, R. A. (2017). Using sources effectively: Strengthening your writing and avoiding
plagiarism. Routledge.
Ocholla, D. N., & Ocholla, L. (2016). Does open access prevent plagiarism in Higher
Education. African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science, 26(2), 189-
202.
Packer, D. J., Fujita, K., & Chasteen, A. L. (2014). The motivational dynamics of dissent
decisions: A goal-conflict approach. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(1),
27-34.

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Sahi, M., & Gupta, V. (2016, March). Efficiency comparison of various plagiarism detection
techniques. In Electrical, Electronics, and Optimization Techniques (ICEEOT),
International Conference on (pp. 2974-2978). IEEE.