How do you avoid plagiarism?

There are only so many ideas out there. If you COPY the whole plot, lines from it, even out right take it whole cloth - that's plagerism. If you take just the idea, change things around, even change the ending, that is not.

I only consider it plagiarism when most words are the same. I believe many ideals we already have have been looked at already. Ideals are borrowed thoughts we share with one another. How we assemble such thoughts and put them to paper is our own choosing. If you just copy and paste then you are such a waste. As long as the thought and ideal doesn't look exactly the same and from one source it's not plagirism.is

I wouldn't think getting an idea would be plagiarism but if you followed the same story line it could be. As all of my writing is done for the internet I have to be very very careful about researching and not using the same wording at all that someone else has used. We (the company I work for and I) check for this, there is a company online you can put your article (has to be on a web page) in and it will find all the other sites that have any duplicated wording. One of our writers was fired recently for plagarism - some of his work was word for word copied while almost everything else he had done had at least a pharagraph or sentence copied word for word. REally bad thing was the client found this out before we did.