What is plagiarism? " Simply put, plagiarism is the process of taking other people’s words and/or ideas and pretending that they are your own".source

As you can see from the above definition, plagiarism can take any form, it could be written, audio, video, graphics and more.
There are many types of plagiarism and they go by different names by different people.
Let's take a look at some popular type of plagiarism

Types of plagiarism

(a) Global Plagiarism: This seems to be the worst of it all. This has to do with taking an entire piece of somebody' s work, in fact I would refer to it as as wholesale takeover, without permission. This is really bad, and should be avoided by all means.

(b) Paraphrasing plagiarism: This has to do with rewriting, changing words and phrases without citations. This is improper in that it is someone's idea resulting in " Esau's body, Jacob's voice"

(c) Verbatim plagiarism: This plagiarism conveys the idea of copying word for word, other people's work, no quotation- no citations. Using those materials as if they are our own. This should rejected.

(d) Mosaic plagiarism: This one has another name used to describe it in various places - patching. It entails taking from here and there. Using some things from other sources to complement ours without proper reference or credit.

(e) Self plagiarism: One wonders how, well when we have submitted our own work to, perhaps a body, and we go to use the same material and submit it to be used in another work. That also could also be viewed as self plagiarism.

(f) Accidental Plagiarism: One can mistakenly make wrong citations or even forget to mention a source he or she ought to. In this regard, it is still an error and could be regarded as plagiarized.source

Consequences of plagiarism

This can lead to legal tussle and one can be found guilty of stealing intellectual property in the worst case scenario. It can result to serious fines and penalties, including prison sentences. On the other it can cause a lot of harm to an institution, be it academics, medical and more. It spoils reputation.

We should endeavor to refrain from Plagiarism. It denies credit to whom it's due, in this case the source of the idea or information taken. And none of us will like every other person to make use of our work, without acknowledgement.

Plagiarism on the surface seems like an easy route to achieve one's aim, but just like we mentioned earlier, it comes with a price, and sometimes very huge price.

Some of the phrases use by some people to describe plagiarism, includes "steal" and " acts of fraud", "fraudulent",strong words as you can see

It also deprive the culprit the opportunity to make good use of his natural talent, which was referred to by Steemit as "proof of brain"

It will do us a whole lot of good to do some critical thinking in order to come up with our own ideas. It makes us feel satisfied, looking at what we are able to accomplish. We can then become ourselves the reference point.

However, there will be time when we would like to use other people's works, perhaps to buttress our point, at such time, we should always give credit to our source.
Such demonstrates fairness and good judgement, we avoid being seen as crossing the boundary of content etiquettes.

So, always say no to plagiarism.

"I have read and understood the Steemit Etiquette on Steemit Community and will do my best to embrace them"