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The essay shows Students Are Turning to Plagiarism Because They Lack Writing Skills involve reading comprehensive skills

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Students Are Turning to Plagiarism Because They Lack Writing Skills

Introduction

Writing is complicated task for the present day college students as they lack some of the major skills in them. These skills involve reading comprehensive, analytical skills, constructing a demonstrated argument, designing a writing strategy, and communicating ideas concisely. Some of the students also lack the common writing mechanics, such as sentence structuring, grammar, and spelling. They are unable to marshal evidence effectively by using the available sources appropriately (Naber, & Wyatt, 2014). As most of the students lack these common skills, their writing ability decrease and become unsatisfactory in various ways such as poor grammar or weak arguments and reasoning, or unclear structuring of sentence. The area of concern is that most of these students also have poor reading skills, which even worsen their writing skill. For instance, when a student is unable to identify the main point in a phrase in his/her reading, then the consequence writing will have no meaning. In addition to this, the students also lack the skill of meta-cognition which could help them to recognise their area which have insufficient knowledge and skill and which one needs to be further improvise (Kayaoglu, Erbay, Flitner, & Saltas, 2016). Nowadays, the students have decreased their writing frequency and standard in their high school career, and its following consequences they face during their college years.  

Statistical report

According to a study of George Washington University, the students of first year undergraduates said that their writing sessions at high school career only ask them to provide and support the opinions, along with synthesizing and summarizing information. They are rarely given the opportunity or task to define a problem, or criticize an argument, or prepare a solution. They never got the task to write on a revised work or to meets the readers’ requirement (Knoch, Rouhshad, Oon, 2015). The writing assessment score out of 20 (total) includes: thesis statement-1, introduction-2, body-6, conclusion-2, vocabulary-2, punctuation marks-2, speclling-1, cohesion-2, and grammar-2. Further, based on the survey report of The Chronicle of Higher Education it is found that more than 61 percent of the high school teachers have the view that their students have never given any written assignment of more than 3 pages. This resulted in insufficient writing practice for developing a well versed writing skill. The survey report also suggested that in most of the high school students are taught to avoid the first person while writing, which later resulted in awkward, meaningless, and grammatically incorrect sentences (Liu, Lu, Lin, 2018). Such bad writing habits of students which they have learned in their school age needs to be unlearn.   

Reasons for lack of writing skill

There are several reasons behind the poor writing skill of a student which ultimately lead them to practice plagiarism.

•             How to start- sometimes a student knows everything on the given topic but has no idea of how to frame it or start it to give it a proper meaning. The basic reason behind this common situation is lack of writing practice and also lack of critical thinking ability.

•             Grammatical error- most of the students pay little importance towards grammar which then become their writing habit. For example, writing ‘then’ in place of ‘than’ is a huge grammatical mistake and cannot be ignored (Naber, & Wyatt, 2014).

•             Message language- in the present time, social media and instant messaging facility have completely changed the writing habit of students. Nearly 98 percent are on social media sites such as Whatsapp, or Facebook and are busy in messaging. They often use the short-cut messaging terms such as, r, u, gud, c, 2nite, or 2dy, which made eventually weaken their English vocabulary.

•             Poor communication skill- students having poor listening and speaking ability have poor communication skill. Both listening and writing skill affect the writing skill, so writing skill is the reflection of what we listen and speak. In our day to day life, the way we speak translate it into our writings. There are also some students who write very well in the beginning but fail to explain them (Kayaoglu, Erbay, Flitner, & Saltas, 2016).   

Recommendations and suggestions

In schools students should be taught the basic writing rules and skills by introducing the new writing courses in the syllabus. For those students who have no idea of writing sentences, the teachers should give special attention and train them from ground up. The students should focus on certain points to improve their writing skill:

•             Planning and then writing- An outline of the write writing structure should be made, as it acts like a plan to cover the entire topic precisely and effectively (Sternglass, 2017).

•             Focus on communication- communication comes from both speaking and listening, so it needed to become a patient listener and a strong speaker. Moreover, before writing on any topic the student should go through the entire paragraph to draw the main points which will be helpful while writing. 

•             Conclude- the student should learn to explain his/her findings of research work and present it in a meaning way.

•             No plagiarism- plagiarism is just copying other’s work from internet without referencing it or quoting it. Most of the students find Wikipedia as one of the easiest source to get information and make copy and paste as their work. Nowadays most of institutions have software to check plagiarism (Kayaoglu, Erbay, Flitner, & Saltas, 2016).

Conclusions

To improve the writing skills of students the teacher should provide them full freedom of topic choice for writing. They should be encouraged to develop their thinking capability rather than doing plagiarism, especially in the writing classes. When students choose their own topic for writing, their interest and self-understanding increases. This process is not enough for the college students to generate their interest for writing and restrict them from doing plagiarism. The teachers should think of other technique to motivate and create interest witching students towards writing and improve their writing skill (Kight, 2018). Eventually students will also acknowledge the importance of writing by themselves without doing any kind of plagiarism as it is against the academic community.

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