Seminar on “Ways to avoid Plagiarism: paraphrasing, citation, referencing, etc.”

Plagiarism: paraphrasing, citation, referencing, etc.” by Ms Rachel Kim Eng Wong, Malaysia on 26 September 2018 from 12:00 to 13:00 in the VIP Room of the college for students and staff. Mr Mangesh Wanjari introduced the speaker to the audience before Ms Rachel started her session.

Ms Rachel introduced attendees to Malaysia and its culture with the help of a video and started the session by asking basic questions about plagiarism. She then gave a detailed insight into avoiding plagiarism by paraphrasing the contents of the referenced source. She first discussed basic techniques such as changing active to passive, direct to indirect, etc. Then, by giving examples of how paraphrasing can be used in practice to avoid plagiarism, she discussed detailed paraphrasing techniques. She focused on five ways of paraphrasing: using a thesaurus, understanding ideas and rewriting by changing words, changing the order of words, changing negative sentences to positive, and converting numbers to percentage and vice versa. After that she discussed citations where she described the differences between quoting and referring to the source, using an appropriate example. 

The seminar was enthusiastically attended by many students of the Advanced Diploma and Bachelor level who are doing Course Projects. Many faculty members also attended the seminar. It was a great learning experience to the students and staff who wish to contribute towards research and technical report writing.

Dr Duhai Al Shukaili, Head of the department of Information Technology appreciated Ms Rachel’s efforts and awarded her with a certificate and a memento. 

In the end, feedback was collected from members attending the seminar. The majority showed their satisfaction on the arrangements done. On the scale of 5, average feedback was 3.34.