With increasing frequency, colleges and universities are making use of Web-based plagiarism checking services to scan papers for stolen material. And the consequences can be dire: at one end of the spectrum, a failing grade for the assignment; at the other end, dismissal from an academic program. If you are intentionally plagiarizing in your paper, thesis, or dissertation, this should give you pause. But if you are not intentionally plagiarizing, there could still be reason for concern. Plagiarism checking software catches an ever-growing amount of appropriated material–and sometimes the student has not even meant to do anything wrong! In what follows, I’d like to offer some simple tips for avoiding plagiarism of the unintentional variety.
1. Know what constitutes plagiarism. Simply put, plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of another person without giving credit to the person from whom they are borrowed. Right off the bat, this tells us something important: you can’t simply change a few words of a borrowed text (so that the passage is no longer a direct quotation) and think that you are out of danger. Unless the material is “common knowledge,” a citation is needed for any material you borrow–whether it is a direction quotation, a paraphrase, or even just an idea.
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When you are thinking about a thesis topic it can become difficult to choose a certain area. This will be particularly important to you if you are new to producing your own piece of original research, and especially if you are looking to complete a paper on an undergraduate degree course. If you have a good understanding of what is required of you, what your paper will look like, and where to find suitable research materials to establish the grounding of your paper, then a topic for your paper shouldn’t be all that difficult.
In your area of study, there will be a variety of topics from which you can choose to focus on. It really doesn’t matter what topic you decide on, as long as you make it straightforward and manageable for yourself, and making something too difficult for you to complete wouldn’t be a good start to the choice of topic at all. There are generally considered two trains of thought when coming to the point of how to choose your topic, and how this will form the direction of the paper. This is through a straightforward hypothesis, that is usually found in undergraduate research papers; leaving this part in question form is usually for the advanced researcher/writer, and is usually reserved for postgraduate research theses. The choice in topic that you choose to write on will also shape the content and format of your paper – essentially what it will look like to the reader.
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The are general specifications and formatting rules for Dissertations and Thesis, but every University has its own layout requirement, the general specifications and formatting rules are more or less similar. The dissertations should have double space margins throughout, except for the approval page, title page, figure headings, endnotes and footnotes, and extensive quotations. Any standard font can be selected, ensuring that the same font is used throughout. The book titles, foreign words, letters and taxonomic names can be in italics.
The dissertation page margins are 1.5 on the left, and the top, right and bottom margins are set to 1. The white bond paper that are used for dissertations or thesis have a size of 11″ x 8.5″, but for pocket material and photographic plates there are exceptions.
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