Writing quality research projects comes with rules, ethics, and guidelines. Unfortunately, most of our today’s students lack the proper knowledge of academic ethics, or are just too lazy to to take them into consideration.
Be that as it may, many students end up committing cardinal sins that violate academic integrity and rules thus causing them to face severe penalties. In this article, I want to address the three cardinal sins commonly committed by students in the course of writing their research project, and offer solutions on how to avoid them.
Keep reading.
1. Plagiarism
Plagiarism is an academic theft. It’s a crime. You’re a thief if you copy other people’s work (without crediting them) just like a thief who walks into a store and steals a fragrance or wrist watch (that doesn’t belong to them).
Students steal materials – not belonging to them and claim that it’s theirs – because it’s simple thing to do. I mean, you can copy-paste a paragraph in less than two seconds and brag that it’s all yours. Pretty simple, right?
However, some students don’t even know that they’ve committed a crime by citing others, and claiming the authorship of the content. Why? Because they lack the knowledge of proper citation and academic ethics. Still, that counts as a crime too. And they’re punished, just like those who know the fault of their actions.
To avoid being punished for this crime, you’ve got to be obsessed with producing quality work. You also should familiarize yourself with proper citation, and learn the ethics of academic writing.
2. Shallow research
One of the major sins commonly committed by students when writing their research project is doing shallow research. In other words, they tend to investigate literature and findings just below the surface.
They do so because, let’s face the reality, they’re lazy. Unlike our great scholars and teachers, we’re very lazy when it comes to research and learning. We want result, sure, but we don’t want to put in the hours and proper work to achieve great results.
How to avoid that? We must conduct quality research in order to produce quality research project – research work that adds value to the academic community.
3. Poor writing
Poor writing is another grave sin that affects the quality of your research project. Poor writing include writing in a non-academic way, crafting bundle of texts that lacks clarity and focus, and lack of enough data, statistics, and facts that will back up your thesis statement or answers your research questions.
You may commit this crime because you don’t have academic writing skills, among others. However, you can avoid that by mastering the academic writing skills, which you can even learn on your own.
It’s simple to master the academic writing skills, along with becoming conversant with academic integrity and ethics. With a lot of resources on the Internet, all you need is 30 minutes a day to sit down and do nothing but learn these skills. It will help you avoid academic theft, shallow research that shattered your project, and poor writing that shame your credibility in your peers.
