My thoughts on plagiarism

I know I've been referrencing urbandictionary.com a lot, but I always find interesting the definitions people write for some things :)

Here is one interesting about plagiarism that pretty much sums it all:

Plagiarism

What people who either can't write or are too lazy do whenever a paper is due. Any usage of someone else's writing as one's own is plagiarism, no matter how cleverly disguised (or not) it is.

Last weekend, during Associated College Press Conference in Phoenix, where we represented NEIU with the Independent, I attended a workshop called "Can we use that?" Not until then had I really considered plagiarism and copyright that important, but when I think that somebody else could use my work and not credit me for it, I like the idea of plagiarism less and less.

I am certain that I won't do it just as much I wouldn't like that somebody else plagiarizes my work.

The way I've learned so far to avoid plagiarism is to try to find as many sources as possible and then by pretty much reading the same thing written in different forms, you get an idea of what you would write, and by mixing all those sources in your head you are less likely to say it in somebody's exact words.
I also attended a lecture last semester at campus which gave us some ideas on how to avoid plagiarism. The lecture pretty much proved that I, and I believe most of the students, make a mistake when underlining the important sentences in our source texts, because that is the easiest way (unwillingly) to plagiarize. The lecturers suggestion was to read the sentence, look away from it, and then without looking back to try to sum it up - you weren't looking at the text long enough to remember the exact same words, so the result will most probably be our own.

Well, if there is anyone reading this blog, I hope these techniques help you with your further papers!