Theft comes in different forms. It normally is just understood as stealing someone else’s possessions. We normally understand the possessions as normal stuff like money, bags and clothes. In the world of the internet, there is theft too just in a different form. People steal other people’s texts and don’t give them credit. We call this theft Plagiarism.

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Simply put, plagiarism can be thought of as using someone else’s work as your own without giving them proper acknowledgement or credit. It doesn’t really matter whether you did it deliberately or not, plagiarism intentionally or unintentionally is still considered plagiarism. To avoid disciplinary action and to keep a good reputation it is important we avoid plagiarism.

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How do we avoid plagiarism then you might ask?
Well its actually quite simple. We know that we’re plagiarizing when we don’t give the original author credit so the work around this is simply to cite our work, giving authors the acknowledgement they deserve and putting text that is not ours in quotation marks. We should also put in more of our words when paraphrasing. Obviously, we can avoid plagiarism by creating our own original work.

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We have different types or forms of plagiarism. These are from typical copy and paste scenarios to plagiarizing one’s own work by duplicating it. I’ll explain some common forms of plagiarism below.

The typical copy and paste people do on the internet where they just highlight a whole chunk of text and simply use CTRL C and V is under Direct Plagiarism. People on the internet have normalized this so much but it is actually a lifestyle frowned upon both on steemit and in real life.

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Self-plagiarism also refered to as Duplication has to do with reusing your own work in full or parts without referencing the original. Yes, you can plagiarize your own work! Hence we should try as much as we can to reference our own works if we ever want to reuse them again to avoid Self-plagiarism.

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Most people plagiarize content unaware or you could say accidentally. This type of plagiarism is called Accidental Plagiarism. As much as Accidental Plagiarism is not intentional, it is still considered plagiarism and we have to be very conscious of this.

I think aside Direct Plagiarism, the most common type of plagiarism is Mosaic Plagiarism where someone takes another person’s work and “patches” or modifies it with a few words of their own to pass as their own original idea without acknowledging the original author’s work.

The most severe among all the types of plagiarism is Complete Plagiarism. In this case a researcher takes a complete work of another author and presents it as his own.

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The reasons people plagiarism are vast but quite obvious. A lot of people plagiarize content because they can’t produce quality original content of their own. If people really put work in producing their content, I believe they’re equally capable of producing very good content as great authors put in a lot of time and effort to produce quality content. Other people plagiarize because of the reputation of the original author or his works.

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Remarks
I am confident to say that "I have read and understood the Steemit Etiquette on Steemit Community and will do my best to embrace them".