The Need to Minimize Plagiarism

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When writing scholarly work, we have most of the times based our work from experience, research, and experimentation. Most of the times, we also have tendency of using other people ideas. However when we use other people’s ideas, we have to ensure that they are given due credits for their work or idea. If that does not happen, we start flirting with cheating, dishonesty, or simply put integrity issues. Why is that? The answer to that question is plagiarism. Plagiarism is the intentional or unintentional use of other people’s work or idea without giving them their due credit. This not only limited to scholarly environment, but to everything from literature to music. For example, there is a female pop star in the United States who uses a folk song, which has been used for years in the Cameroon army. But she failed to event recognized that it because she claimed that although the song might sound familiar, but that was her creation. Of course, she wrote the song but unintentionally or intentionally use the hook from the old folk military song. Plagiarism is counter productive and it calls attention to one’s integrity regardless is the person is a high school students, a scholar-practitioner, or a musician. It is necessary, people especially scholar-practitioners get educated and get the thorough understanding of plagiarism in order to be able to avoid them.
As scholar-practitioner, we are bound to establish a trusting relationship with our audience as we communicate with them through or writings and discussions. With that need to be responsible on how we seamlessly infuse other people’s thoughts and ideas into our work, yet giving the originators the proper credit (Laureate Education, 2013). We are entering field of exp...

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...udent could have wrote one or two sentences summary with a lead in “in the article Tainted Crossen (1994) argued that or stated that …”, or the student could have use a direct quotation for 40 words or more in a freestanding block of text (APA, 2012).

In conclusion, plagiarism is wrong and the claim of ignorance on the subject is not a valid excuse for it, because it discredits person and puts the field of expertise or school in a bad light. As scholar practitioner, it is our job and duty to have personal and professional integrity to ensure that we give credit to the work and sources we use to make our work relevant. We owe it to our audience, our institution, and academia to guaranty that those practices are eliminated from our field of expertise. Therefore we have to make an effort to learn and understand plagiarism, and what are ways we can use to avoid it.

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