Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full or any acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition. Plagiarism may be intentional or reckless, or unintentional. Under the regulations for examinations, intentional or reckless plagiarism is a disciplinary offence.

As I have said before, plagiarism is a dishonest act of trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own.

It’s the type of unethical practice that can land writers, editors, and academic researchers in hot water.

However, there are multiple types of plagiarism and they aren’t all created equal. Some aren’t even intentional.

In this task, I will discuss the seven (7) most common types of plagiarism, including examples, so you can avoid plagiarism in your writing.

Having listed the seven (7) common types of plagiarism, I want to go into detail and explain each one of them one after the other. Now let's get started so that we can be able to spot the difference between this types of plaigarism.

MOSAIC OR PATCHWORK PLAGIARISM:- With this type of plagiarism, the work of someone else is simply paraphrased without proper citation. It’s often difficult to detect because the plagiarized material is interwoven with many different sources, including the writer’s own ideas and perspective.

This type of paraphrasing can be done from one or several sources. The writer may try to change up the sentence structure or use synonyms to make it seem original. However, taking the idea of another piece is still plagiarism, even if the words are switched up a bit and intermingled with original thought.
Source

PARAPHRASING PLAGIARISM:- Paraphrasing, or incremental plagiarism, is the most common type of plagiarism. It’s similar to the mosaic plagiarism style mentioned above. However, the difference is that the copied work isn’t mixed in with new concepts and research. When you paraphrase the original idea in your own words, the borrowed material stays the same throughout the new piece.

Source

SELF-PLAGIARISM:- Also known as auto-plagiarism, self-plagiarism happens when you copy your own writing, whether intentional or not. Often the person in a self-plagiarism incident is summarizing or repurposing their own work instead of writing a whole new piece from scratch on the same topic.

Many people think self-plagiarism is harmless because you aren’t stealing from someone else. Just yourself. But, this type of plagiarism can be just as damaging as any other.

For example, if you are writing web pages and you are caught plagiarizing, you could end up getting penalized by Google for duplicate content.

Or, if you are writing for clients, your words may no longer belong to you. This could even result in potential legal issues if it is a breach of your client contract.
Source

ACCIDENTAL PLAGIARISM:- Plagiarism doesn’t always happen on purpose. It’s still considered plagiarism when someone copies another’s writing without citing their source, improperly cites the source or leaves out quotation marks on accident. Just because the omission or incorrect citation was accidental doesn’t mean plagiarism hasn’t been committed. This is why it’s important to check any work and when in doubt, give your source credit.

COMPLETE PLAGIARISM:- Complete plagiarism is more common in academic writing than in content marketing or other types of online writing. This type of plagiarism occurs when someone tries to submit an entire research paper as their own without proper attribution.

For example, this involves copying and pasting the original work in its exact words. The only thing that is changed is the author’s name.
Source

DIRECT OR VERBATIM PLAGIARISM:-Direct plagiarism, also known as verbatim or copy-paste plagiarism, is an intentional and unethical form of stealing content. As the name suggests, the writing is stolen word for word and pasted into the new piece. The author then tries to pass off the content as their own. A word or two might be changed, but this type of plagiarism is too blatant to be considered paraphrasing.

Source

SOURCE-BASED PLAGIARISM:-This type of plagiarism refers to instances when misleading sources are involved. For example, the writer may have two sources of information but only reference one. Another form of source-based plagiarism would be when an author quotes a non-existent or incorrect source.

The worst type of this kind of plagiarism is when sources are fabricated. Making up information like study findings or statistics is extremely misleading and can even be harmful in the case of medical content.
Source

"Most cases of plagiarism can actually be avoided, however, by citing sources. Simply acknowledging that certain material has been borrowed and providing your audience with the information necessary to find that source is usually enough to prevent plagiarism"

Based on my own understanding and findings I have made, I believe the easiest way to avoid plaigarism is by giving credit to the original owner of the work. More also all sources for the work you have used should be properly cited. In this way we can completely avoid any form of plaigarism.

"I have read and understood the Steemit etiquette on Steemit Community and will do all that is in my power to embrace them"

This very task has helped me in no small way to avoid every form of plagiarism. The topic generally has educated me on types of plagiarism and how to completely avoid this plagiarism. I want to sincerely appreciate @simonnwigwe for his tutor and guidance all through this process of writing and understanding the do's and dont's of the Steemit platform. I do hope to learn more from him as the time goes bye.