Plagiarism not word for word

Asked by: Itzel Gislason

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(59 votes)

No word-for-word and no paraphrasing plagiarism is present. Thus, the writing must be common knowledge or the writer’s own ideas.

Is plagiarism only word for word?

Plagiarism is an ethical concept, not a legal one, so there is no universal accepted standard. The ‘five-consecutive word’ is a rule of thumb, not a legal precept.

How many words does it take to plagiarize?

The rule of thumb is: More than three consecutive words, not counting short words such as «a,» «the,» «but,» «in,» «an,» or «and» need either quotation marks and a footnote or acknowledgement of the author in the text of your paper.

Does Turnitin check word for word?

Turnitin does not check word for word. … This means that Turnitin will use particular keywords to scan for the similarity between your paper and works that are available in its database.

Is it plagiarism if reworded?

Most of us understand that just copying and pasting someone else’s work, without providing a citation, is plagiarism. But what if: You change a word or two in the sentence after you paste it into your paper, then provide a citation at the end of it. … You rewrite the sentence or paragraph or sentence in your own words.

41 related questions found

Plagiarism is derived from the Latin word “Plagiarius” meaning “kidnapper”. Plagiarism means stealing or copying another’s work and representing it as own work. On Internet, everything is available for free. We can share, upload, download, view, or search any text, audio, and video. Everything is there for free. The availability of anything and everything on the internet has made our lives easier but people make misuse of this advantage of the internet by representing other’s work as their own for fame, for academic benefits, for money, for personal interests, etc. 

Plagiarism is most commonly practiced in academics and researches. On the internet, we have all kinds of literary articles, educational content, research papers, etc available for free. This facilitates everyone and assists them in gaining knowledge and becoming literate. Earlier when there were no Internet people either had to visit libraries when they wanted to study or know anything or had to purchase expensive books. But now we just type the topic in our browser and we get thousands of search results. As a result, some people use these articles, research papers, educational content in an adverse manner.

Plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional. We should have the knowledge of what can be called plagiarized content and what not. Following are the key points to understand what can be called as plagiarism:

• If we use another person’s work under our name.
• If we copy other’s ideas and words and don’t give them the credit.
• If we download copyrighted images or music and present them as our own.
• If we copy maximum words and modify them so that we can cleverly use them under our own name.
• If we use someone else’s copyrighted music or video for our own music cover or video.
• If we recreate an image, video, music, article, etc in such a manner that it is quite similar to the original one.

Types of Plagiarism

There are several types of plagiarism. In this article, we will get to know the common ones:

• Complete Plagiarism: Complete Plagiarism is the most extreme form of plagiarism. In this plagiarism, a person completely copies someone else’s work such as a research paper, article, image, etc, and represents it as their own work. This form of plagiarism is similar to identity theft or stealing.
• Verbatim: Verbatim is also known as direct plagiarism. When we read a book we must have observed that if any statement that a famous person has made is always represented in double quotations and is highlighted so that we get to know that it is said by this particular person. Similarly consider a person writing an article and mentioning someone’s else work or words that too exactly the same. But this person doesn’t represent it in quotation marks. Then that person is said to be exhibiting direct plagiarism. Hence copying another person’s work word to word and not representing it in quotation marks is known as Verbatim or direct plagiarism.
• Self Plagiarism: This kind of plagiarism is the duplication of a person’s own work. It is also known as auto plagiarism. It occurs when a person copies some words of his own published work and uses the same for another work. This form of plagiarism is commonly observed in research journals. Researchers may make re-use of their research work for another research work, however, the percentage of re-usage must be according to those set by the publishing journals if they allow them to do so.
• Source-Based Plagiarism: This form of plagiarism is most commonly observed in research work. In the research paper one needs to provide references that have contributed to their work, If a person provides wrong references that do not exist, or that are not relating to the work then it is known as source-based plagiarism. The falsification of data or its fabrication is also source-based plagiarism. Falsification and fabrication of data are manipulating or representing false or non-existing data.
• Accidental Plagiarism: This kind of plagiarism mostly occurs due to a lack of knowledge. If we don’t know how to paraphrase, cite and quote a research work we leave the work as it is and it results in accidental plagiarism.

Why is plagiarism unethical?

• Plagiarism is unethical because we are representing someone’s other work as our own without giving them the right to. In the real world if someone else takes our things without our permission then we call that person a “thief” and doing so is considered as a punishable offense. Similarly if in the virtual world someone copies someone else’s work it is unethical and is a punishable offense.
• Plagiarism affects the integrity of academics. Researchers are given the degree of Ph.D. on basis of their research works, students are given grades according to their homework. If we will be practicing plagiarism we will not be gaining any knowledge. We may even succeed in getting our Ph.D. degree or good grades but that will put our career at risk and is a threat to our future. We will be a risk for society, organizations where we may work as we do not have the complete knowledge of the corresponding work.
• If we use the plagiarized content for our personal benefits such as monetary gains, fame, etc then it is unethical because we are being benefitted for what we actually have not done. We are being rewarded without actually performing well or giving our 100 percent to get that reward. It is immoral to do so.

How to avoid plagiarism?

There are certain steps we can follow in order to avoid plagiarism.

• Always give credit to the person whose work you are including in your own work. Make use of double quotations to prevent verbatim.
• Build your own ideas and thoughts and use them in your work. Do not copy another person’s ideas or work. Develop yourself and work on yourself so that you can enhance your thought process. Increase the domain of your knowledge.
• Make use of paraphrasing. Paraphrasing means the representation of an idea or thought in our own words in such a manner that the original essence of that idea remains the same. But we should also do paraphrasing in such a manner that it does not convert to plagiarism.
• Use online plagiarism checker tools. There are many sites that offer plagiarism checker tools. These sites check your work against thousands of other works available on the internet and give you a percentage of plagiarized or unique content. They can even tell from which site the content is copied. We should always use plagiarism checker tools in order to prevent plagiarism. Some of the plagiarism checking tools are – Grammarly, smallseotools, turnitin, quetext, etc.
• Always provide correct references in your research paper or article.
• Learn how to cite your articles, provide references, use double quotations, etc. You should know how to write a scholarly article or book or research paper before you begin writing.
• If you are using someone else’s videos, images, or audios in your own video, etc always ask them first, and even after that provide them the credit for the same.
• Keep your morals high. Be educated about plagiarism and be an ethical person. As in real life, you don’t do bad things as you know the differentiation between what is good and bad similarly teach your inner conscience that plagiarism is unethical and you should not make use of plagiarized content.

Laws against plagiarism

There are many laws against plagiarism. Some of them are mentioned below-

• In section 57 of the Indian Copyright Act 1957, authors have “the right to claim authorship of their works among other things. It grants the authors the special right to be attributed for their work. The statute recognizes the right to attribution analogous to the rights not to be plagiarized.”
• In section 63 of the ICA 1957, “a convicted infringer is liable to be imprisoned between six months to three years, and to be fined between fifty thousand and two lakh rupees”.
• University Grants Commission or UGC has provided a certain set of guidelines that need to be followed by universities in order to prevent plagiarism in academic activities.

Sample Questions

Question 1. What is plagiarism?

Solution:

Plagiarism is stealing or copying another’s work and representing it as our own work without giving them the credit.

Question 2. Why is plagiarism unethical?

Solution:

Plagiarism is unethical because we are representing someone else works as our own without giving them the right to. It also affects academic integrity adversely.

Question 3. What is verbatim?

Solution:

Copying another person’s work word to word and not representing it in quotation marks is known as Verbatim. Verbatim is also known as direct plagiarism.

Question 4. What is paraphrasing?

Solution:

Paraphrasing means the representation of an idea or thought in our own words in such a manner that the original essence of that idea remains the same

Question 5. Mention any law against plagiarism.

Solution:

In section 57 of the Indian Copyright Act 1957, authors have “the right to claim authorship of their works among other things. It grants the authors the special right to be attributed for their work. The statute recognizes the right to attribution analogous to the rights not to be plagiarized.”

Back at the end of the 2016 US Presidential Election, many people accused a specific person of plagiarism. This mainstream occurrence of duplicity shot up the searches related to it on all the search engines.

Nowadays, plagiarism is a common problem in every aspect of life. All content creators, scriptwriters, SEO writers, and students face this problem. On the other hand, some of them deliberately plagiarize to save time and effort.

In fact, a study conducted revealed that 40% of the students openly admitted to plagiarizing in assignments. The same study also saw 43% confessing to plagiarizing on tests or exams. While websites and blogs suffer from an overwhelming surplus of duplicated content.

Studies suggest around 30% of websites today have plagiarized content in them. So, what causes it? Moreover, is there a way to avoid plagiarism?

These are all viable questions, but it leads us to understand the idea behind plagiarism and how it can occur intentionally or unintentionally. So, let’s dive right into it and understand what it is and how to avoid it.

Defining plagiarism & common causes

Understanding plagiarism isn’t a difficult task. If you see two eerily similar content in different places, then one of them has to be plagiarized. Unless one of the content pieces accredits the other one. But, accidental plagiarism isn’t something too far off.

People who hadn’t heard the term before came to understand that plagiarism isn’t always about copying and pasting—it’s about stealing ideas and speech patterns as well. A lot of uninitiated people think plagiarism is only about stealing word-to-word from another written text.

However, the University of Oxford describes plagiarism as “presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own.” This should tell you that plagiarism isn’t only copying and pasting; it’s also about being lazy with your ideas and duplicating someone else’s work.

As for the common causes, here are some:

• Laziness or tardiness is the primary reason among students and professionals
• Lack of creativity or understanding is another major reason
• Lack of topic understanding or information
• Tight deadlines
• Fear to fail on a test – is most common among students
• Poor time & workload management skills

While for some, plagiarism is a choice they make because they don’t know better. Evil intentions in writing or literature aren’t unheard of, so some students or professionals would do it to save time and effort.

While various types of plagiarism help us understand that plagiarism isn’t always a matter of choice. Sometimes, it can be accidental; other times, it’s just unintentional.

Main types of plagiarism

Speaking of types of plagiarism, to avoid it efficiently, we must understand what they are. Each type of plagiarism is caused by different intentions or ideas. Therefore, it’s imperative that we understand the different types of plagiarism.

Here are four major kinds:

• Direct/Complete plagiarism

Direct or complete plagiarism is pretty self-explanatory. In this type, the writer copies content or ideas word-to-word. This means no changes or alterations to avoid it from any sort of scanner. It’s the most common type in novices, as many students believe they can get away with it. However, it’s the same in professionals as well. Some just copy ideas and paint them as their own. That’s why it’s considered one of the most unethical types of plagiarism.

• Self/Auto plagiarism

Auto or self-plagiarism is common when a writer works on the same ideas repeatedly. This could be accidental, but nowadays, you can assume it’s intentional for most people. The idea behind this plagiarism is to redo older ideas and revamp them.

This doesn’t avoid plagiarism for a few reasons. One of them is the same topic idea, which is one of the significant reasons for duplicity in the first place. Then, common tropes of similar content can always lead to a plagiarism checker detecting it as duplicate content.

Therefore, even if it’s not intentional, there’s no room for it in any professional or academic environment.

• Mosaic or patchwork plagiarism

Mosaic or patchwork plagiarism is considered to be the most severe and unethical type of plagiarism. It’s mainly because it’s difficult to detect and earns the original author no credit. In this type, a writer would change a few elements here and there to make the content seem original.

Nowadays, advanced AI algorithms can detect this type, but not all tools are capable of finding it. Therefore, it’s considered as one of the most immoral types and must be avoided at all costs. Common traits of patchwork plagiarism will include:

• Similar terms but extensive usage of synonyms
• Using unnatural content tone
• Lack of information distribution or random occurrences of information

• Accidental or unintentional plagiarism

Accidental or unintentional plagiarism is when a writer incidentally copies another writer’s work. The chances of this happening are very rare, but you shouldn’t put it beyond belief. Mainly because a lot of universities and professional environments follow the same patterns & topics. This makes commonly available knowledge a source of plagiarism. So, when students use such sources for their information, accidental plagiarism isn’t a far-fetched occurrence.

However, it still counts as duplicate content, so it’s not allowed either. It makes it any less harmful in any writing setting.

How do you avoid it? What will you need?

Avoiding plagiarism can be straightforward, or it can be complicated – both depend entirely on you. It comes down to the way take to avoid or remove plagiarism from your content. For example:

• Finding plagiarism
• Rewriting the plagiarized content
• Paraphrasing the plagiarized content
• Using tools to do both

The last choice is the best, but the rest can be done easily too. So, here are two of the most important ingredients in a plagiarism-removal recipe:

Comprehensive ways of avoiding plagiarism

As mentioned before, you can rewrite the plagiarized content to remove it. But, how exactly do you go about doing that? A simple way to do it is by finding the plagiarism first. For that, you need a tool that can help you find the source of original content – we’ll talk about that in a bit.

The second step is to rewrite or paraphrase the plagiarized content and credit the original author. This intention alone counts more and helps you remove plagiarism effectively. So, a few ways of plagiarism include:

• Quoting the original author
• Citing after rewording the plagiarized content
• Removing and rewriting the content entirely
• Turning it into an opinion piece

Now, the last point makes sense only in a few topics. A student can easily share their opinion on another writer’s work and write extensive levels of text based on that. However, a professional writer with specific topics may not be able to express opinions.

Yet, it can work if you’re creative enough to figure out a way. So, you need to keep the rewriting methods in mind, which can help you remove plagiarism. The intention of your rewriting process should be to present the idea in your own words but credit the original author.

Now, this can be compromised in the case of universal ideas. For instance, you can rewrite to avoid plagiarism if your topic is getting a university degree. In this case, you won’t have to present the original author, as a universal idea like this can be opinion-based.

What you will need

The things you will need to avoid plagiarism effectively include two sorts of tools:

• A proper online plagiarism checker
• A good paraphrasing tool

The first tool is to help you find plagiarism. Now, you can find plagiarism by simply searching sentences on Google. However, that process is neither efficient nor time-efficient. In fact, it may not even help you find plagiarism, as most people believe it would.

On the other hand, a proper tool can assist you in detecting various types of duplicities—including the types we spoke of above. On top of that, you get to analyze the percentage of plagiarism in your writing. Then, you get to explore the links/sources of the original content.

As for why do you need a paraphrasing tool? Let’s say you find that 500 words out of your 2000-word blog/essay are plagiarized. So, if the due date is soon, there’s no way you can rewrite 500 words quickly.

Now, a paraphrasing or rewriting tool can make this process a lot more easier—and we’ll be exploring that in a bit. Therefore, you need these two tools to remove plagiarism from your writing.

Five steps to avoid plagiarism

Removing plagiarism isn’t rocket science. You need to find it and remove it or rewrite it. But, if only it was as simple as it sounds. Many times, writers aren’t able to do it simply because they can’t find it. Other times, too much of their content is plagiarized.

Therefore, writers must implement a procedure that they can employ day in and day out. It is a process that helps them find and remove duplicity—avoiding plagiarism or any of its types. Therefore, here are five steps they can take to avoid it:

1. Use plagiarism checkers

To avoid plagiarism in your content, you first need to find it. Once you’ve found all the plagiarized bits of text in your content, you can move ahead to removing them.

And this is where you can use a plagiarism checker. While the specific functions and features can differ from tool to tool, the main concept behind their working is the same. Essentially, plagiarism checkers scan the given text against existing online sources to see if there are any matches between them.

The matched part in the text are highlighted in a prominent color (which is red, in most cases) so that they are easier to spot.

While there are many plagiarism checkers available online, not all of them are worth using. The quality of a plagiarism checker is defined by the algorithm it uses for spotting duplication in the given text.

There are several tools that use a highly sensitive algorithm. As a result, they start to point out words like ‘this is’ or ‘it is’ as plagiarism. These types of tools are inaccurate, and are not worth using at all.

Before selecting a plagiarism checker for scanning your work, you should do some research and find out what other users have to say about it. Read some reviews on it. If it is reported to be accurate, then you can go ahead and use it…otherwise not.

1. Paraphrase

‘Paraphrase’ means to change the words and phrases of a piece of content without altering the original sense and intent.

Paraphrasing is a good technique to use when your content is showing up as plagiarized even if you had not intentionally copied it from somewhere.

In this sort of scenario, you can paraphrase your own work to make it different.

There are two main ways in which you can paraphrase your content. You can either do it manually, or you can do it using an online tool. Manual paraphrasing is good when the content at hand is short i.e., it contains 400 – 500 words. However, for longer documents, using a paraphrasing tool is better since it’s more time saving.

Probably the most powerful paraphrasing tool on the market is InstaText. It maximizes text readability in a way that avoids plagiarism. The underlying technology provides you with original text that is likely to have excellent readability without taking actual word combinations from other sources or articles.

1. Use quotes

Using quotations is also a good way to avoid plagiarism in your writing.

Plagiarism is essentially defined as the use of someone else’s content without giving them their due credit. That basically means that if the original source or author is properly credited, it won’t be called plagiarism anymore.

This is precisely what you can do with quotes. If you wrap a sentence or paragraph in quotation marks, you acknowledge that you are using another writer’s words. This automatically saves the copied part from being recognized as plagiarism.

Furthermore, you can write the name of the source after the quoted part to make sure there is nothing lacking in the credit due to the original author. It would look something like this:

“If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.” – Doug Larson

However, it should be borne in mind that quotes are good for a couple of sentences, or a small paragraph at most.

1. Add citations and references

Like quotes, citations and references are also used for neutralizing plagiarism. They are used for giving credit to the original source/author, and thereby preventing the copied part in your work from being recognized as plagiarism.

Citations and references are, contrary to common belief, not the names of the same thing. Citations refer to the bracketed, in-text indicators whereas the reference is the detailed information of the source given at the end of the document. Each citation only describes the name of the author and the year of the publication.

There are different citation styles that you can use such as APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard. For blogging, the MLA style is recommended since it lets you cite just about any type of source.

This image efficiently descirbes the difference between citations and references:

1. Use hyperlinks

Hyperlinking is also a way to attribute a particular fact or piece of info to a particular source. Hyperlinks can only be used in online content (or digital content, more like). They won’t benefit you in any way in content that has to be perused in hard form.

Hyperlinks are usually added to specific words in the text. The linked words are usually colored blue, and are underlined.

The thing to keep in mind about hyperlinks is that they cannot be used everywhere and in just about any number. They have a particular application.

For example, you cannot link to spammy or inappropriate sites. Similarly, you cannot add too many links to your content otherwise it can start to look strange, and readers can get the impression that the whole text is just a collection of copied stuff taken from other sources.

You should add hyperlinks sparingly. Similarly, you should take care to link authoritative and reliable websites/platforms.

Conclusions

We talked about plagiarism, its types, how to find it, and how to remove it as well. This guide should be enough to help you understand what to look for when finding plagiarism and how to go about it when trying to avoid it.

Effective plagiarism prevention includes a plagiarism checker and a good paraphrasing tool. While there are many plagiarism checkers online, it is much more difficult to find a suitable tool for paraphrasing and rewriting.

We have found InstaText to be a powerful tool for rewriting and paraphrasing. InstaText improves the readability of texts while avoiding plagiarism. The underlying technology provides you with original texts that are highly readable, without reusing word combinations from other sources or articles.

Photos by InstaText, Andrea Pexels, and Pavel Danilyuk.

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Free Plagiarism Checker for Students and Teachers

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Deep plagiarism checker for everyone

The free program Studymoose can easily examine your academic texts for plagiarized sentences, save you time, and produce in-depth analysis. As a result, you will get the percentage of stolen text. The program also generates a report with a list of sources that are plagiarized. For convenience, the report can be downloaded to a computer in order to correct those sections of the essay that are highlighted as non-unique. That is, you just need to rewrite some points in your essay, which will increase the originality of the content.

Reliable and Free Plagiarism Checker

Finding a good anti-plag software online is very difficult. As there is no limit, you can upload a large text, or a relatively short one. We have noticed that only three out of ten tools really do their job and detect plagiarized sections precisely, providing a high-quality result. That’s why it was so important for us to make Studymoose good.

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Fix Your Grades

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