When you are using the data of other people by converting it in your words then it is necessary to give the credit to the owner, it means you need to properly cite your source. Giving credit will help you to avoid plagiarism. Be sure to carefully put citation information for your sources which will make your writing process easier. But the question is how to cite sources and avoid plagiarism in academic writing.

If you want to know how to cite sources in academic writing then read it carefully. There are lots of formats for citation styles that can be used according to academic discipline. One of the most used formats is Modern Language Association which is used for citation information and can be included both in text and work cited pages. MLA format is mostly used for English and other humanities courses.

As you know plagiarism is not good and it is against to the institute’s rules. Many of you don’t know what is plagiarism? and how to avoid plagiarism, they just copy the data of others and nothing else. They also don’t know there are punishments for plagiarism. Actually people don’t want to give credit to the real person who is the owner of that information they just want to get all the credit for their selves. You can avoid plagiarism by proper citation and using plagiarism checker tools.

You can avoid plagiarism to show your readers that you have done proper research by listing cite sources you used to get the information. You can also avoid plagiarism by putting the sources which you used for citing. Citations have standard elements and contain all the information about the author and data including author name, title of book, date of publication, page and volume number and also link of the site from where you use the data for citation. The best way to avoid plagiarism is cite your sources both within the body of your academic writing and in the bibliography of sources you used at the end of your paper as references.

You can also cite your own material, for example if some of the material you are using for your work which was used by you in your previous work. So when you want to reuse it you must cite yourself. If you use it without citing it is called self-plagiarism and it is also not acceptable.