How to Avoid Plagiarism in Factual Reports

Plagiarism is using another person's words or ideas and making it look as if they were your own. Plagiarism is theft -- it will tarnish your reputation and you will receive a failing grade if the piece of writing is for a school assignment. In other contexts, there can also be legal repercussions if information is taken from a source and proper citations are not given. You can avoid plagiarism by being creative with your writing, but that's difficult to do with a factual report. There are only so many ways to state a factual statement, but as long as you give credit to any person's information you used in your report, you can avoid plagiarism.

Instructions

    • 1

      Cite all of the information that you found from various sources. You can quote someone and include the results from a study, but you must reference the information in your bibliography and with in-text citations whenever possible.

    • 2

      Write the information in your own words whenever possible. Putting certain kinds of information in your own words is nearly impossible, such as short technical instructions, but if you can, you need to introduce your own voice into the report. Factual reports don't allow for creativity, but you can still word certain pieces of information in your own way. Paraphrasing original information while making sure the reader knows the source of that information through accurate citations is an acceptable way to avoid plagiarism.

    • 3

      Include any quoted information exactly as you found it. You can shorten quotes to an extent, but you cannot change the words in a quote. When shortening a quote, you cannot make the quote appear differently than it was intended. For example, you cannot take the quote "Caffeine has two clear benefits, but does significantly more harm than good" and shorten it to "Caffeine has two clear benefits" to support a statement that caffeine is healthy.

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