Beyond the act of acquiring plagiarism
Sometimes plagiarism is not done on purpose. It might happen when you attempt to paraphrase information from another source but completely fail. Plagiarism typically happens because students are not taught how to correctly incorporate the words and ideas of others, not because they are trying to cheat. Academic fraud is plagiarism. It misleads readers, discredits copied authors, and rewards the plagiarist unfairly. These arguments do, however, not apply to word copying, even though they show that stealing other people's ideas is harmful. Comparatively speaking, stealing other people's ideas is much worse than copying a couple of sentences with no original thought (as in the beginning).
