The Best Way to Avoid Plagiarism in an Argumentative Essay

Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that most students and writers commit knowing and unknowingly. Its most common form includes copying and pasting an author’s published work into your assignments without giving them credit.

Online research databases like Medline and Pubmed offer extensive information about plagiarism and how to avoid it when writing your essays and research papers. So, students should use such resources to understand the ethical guidelines for preparing academic papers. Excellent language skills and a proper understanding of types of plagiarism can help you produce high-quality assignments. However, if you doubt your ability to complete your homework and present ideas without plagiarizing the content, you can ask for help from FastEssay which offers essays for sale and expert guidance to high school and college students, helping them to improve their academic performance.

So, how can you avoid plagiarism when writing an argumentative essay?

Here are 6 techniques that you might find helpful:

1. Take notes of borrowed ideas and prepare a list of references

In argumentative essays, the writing of other authors offers crucial insights and ideas that help to provide a detailed and critical evaluation of the topics presented. Therefore, it is crucial to note down borrowed ideas and keep track of outside information used to support a specific narrative to improve your arguments. Having a record of outside information with their related data, like author’s name, year of publication, and book or journal title reduces the likelihood of misinterpreting content from different sources and integrating peoples’ arguments where they are not required. Through the practice of recording outside information and noting down the sources you have used to gain insights, it is possible to avoid plagiarism because you can easily trace borrowed ideas and cite them.

2. Cite your sources correctly

As we depend on others’ ideas and narratives to broaden our understanding and perspectives when arguing points, it is essential to be very careful about how we ensure outside information does not affect our context and ideological presentation. Consequently, the need to credit sources used when writing provides a pivotal guideline for ethical writing. Crediting other authors’ ideas takes different approaches and follows the required technical integrity in writing, whether argumentative essays or other forms of academic writing. Depending on your approach to writing, first, understand the core ideas of a specific author that you want to credit for and critically develop a narrative around their perspectives about a topic you are analyzing. Secondly, ensure your narrative does not convincingly violate any ethics of writing, for instance, word-to-word copying without quoting. Lastly, after you integrate borrowed narratives or perspectives in your argumentative essay, credit the sources of origin following the appropriate principles with formatting styles that are required for your writing. Through this approach, you avoid plagiarism by appropriately crediting your sources and acknowledging their support towards your arguments and perspectives.

3. Use direct quotes

Plagiarism can also be avoided in argumentative essays by directly quoting the original ideas and words used by a specific author or source. However, while quoting, it is vital to follow the appropriate tenets and standards of ethical writing and integrate outside sources without affecting the narrative of your phrases and ideas. When using quotes to avoid plagiarism in your argumentative texts, you can either include the cited texts in your paragraphs by separating them with quotation marks or, in another line, separate quoted writings away from your arguments.

Regardless of your approach, the quoted words from outside sources need to complement your ideas and offer insightful perspectives that build their expression around your arguments. What’s more, you should be very careful and provide the context of the quoted information where necessary to avoid confusion and misinterpretation from your audience. Moreover, when using quotes, whether in your text or set off from your paragraphs, ensure that you minimize them and only use outside information where necessary.

4. Maintain originality in your arguments

In any writing, originality emphasizes integrity and adherence to the ethical principles that inform the competency and professionalism of authors. Therefore, you should try as much as you can to be original with your ideas and narratives when presenting your points. In addition, you should be creative and think critically while writing your thoughts and ideas. Furthermore, if you want to include your work in an argumentative work, always ensure that you have used proper grammar and words.

5. Paraphrase borrowed ideas/ information

Although it is essential to be original and follow appropriate frameworks in writing to ensure you maintain originality in your arguments, integrating outside information and narratives from other authors helps to critically and competently elaborate on different aspects of an argumentative essay. Therefore, paraphrasing outside information that you need to implement in your writing helps to offer insight and broaden the dimensions of your writing. When paraphrasing, it is necessary to maintain an original stance on your ideas but with a focused approach to factual presentation and detailed analysis of what other sources contextualize relating to your topic. Furthermore, ensuring that you avoid complexities in your narrative is vital to limit how you express your thoughts and paraphrase those that are not yours to make sense and appeal in your wording.

While paraphrasing enhances the originality of an argumentative essay, having a considerable comprehension of vocabulary and phrases that can suit a piece of writing solidifies how you elaborate your arguments and explanations without plagiarizing your essays and other academic tasks. Therefore, paraphrasing external sources and crediting their authors conveys a good aspect of writing that does not contain plagiarized content and makes the narratives and arguments presented competent and credible.

6. Use up-to-date plagiarism detection software

Apart from following ethical guidelines for preparing plagiarism-free papers, it is advisable to use plagiarism detection software like Small SEO Tools, Grammarly, and DupliChecker when writing your assignments. The resources will help you identify plagiarized areas and rephrase or eliminate them.

How easy is it to write plagiarism-free papers?

Writing plagiarism-free papers is easier than you’ve ever imagined. However, you should understand the ethical guidelines for preparing essays and apply them in your writing. By using your own words without copying an author’s ideas, you can write research papers without plagiarizing sources. Citing sources using quotation marks, paraphrasing, and citing sources are some effective approaches that can help you avoid plagiarism. At first, things may seem challenging, especially if you are a high school student or freshman but you’ll realize how easy it is to amplify ideas without compromising your papers’ quality and originality if you practice the techniques that we have outlined in this article.