Plagiarism is an unethical activity in which a person uses the work of another in their own without crediting the original author. Typically, such an act of using other people’s work is also done without their permission or knowledge.
Plagiarism can have dire consequences. It is not a crime itself, but a plagiarist is essentially doing theft and fraud at the same time. The original owners of the work can seek legal restitution against the plagiarist, which can cost them a lot.
Incidentally, plagiarism is not tolerated anywhere, hence a known plagiarist can never hope to make a career out of writing once their reputation is destroyed.
However, plagiarism can also occur in one’s work accidentally. Unfortunately, this has the same consequences as normal, intentional plagiarism.
Hence, being able to detect and remove plagiarism is an important skill that all writers must know. In this article, we are going to look at some tips to avoid and minimize the instances of plagiarism in your work and then we are going to look at some tools that can be used to detect plagiarism.
Tips to Avoid Plagiarism in Essay Writing
Conduct In-depth Research
The first step in avoiding plagiarism is to remove any excuses to commit plagiarism. People resort to copying others when they don’t have enough information on the subject themselves.
To rectify that, do in-depth research about the topic. When you have done a lot of research and understood it, then you can say that you have enough information to be able to write on it.
When you are backed by knowledge, you can easily write at length about the subject without feeling lost or lacking in words. That confidence also becomes visible in your writing, and chances are that your essay will become a splendid piece.
Research from Multiple Sources
While conducting thorough research is great and all, care must be taken to not rely on one source too much. Human beings are social creatures and they are always getting influenced by their environment in small ways.
Relying on only one source is a sure-fire method of committing plagiarism as you will be affected by the writer’s bias and views.
When conducting research from multiple sources, such concerns are lessened dramatically as you are no longer affected by the views of one author alone. The different views and values presented by different authors ensure that in the end, you formulate your own opinion rather than follow someone else.
This is a great method to avoid plagiarism.
Use Quotations and Citations
When writing an essay, it is impossible to hope that one can create all of its content by oneself. At some point, you will need to use the ideas of another to prove or disprove a point.
Now, this is an easy step to commit plagiarism. However, writers with integrity can use a simple trick to avoid plagiarism.
They simply need to use quotations for the parts that they used verbatim and cite all the other parts that they may have rewritten.
Remember, using other people’s work is fine and does not count as plagiarism as long you give them their due credit. Citations and quotations are methods to give the original authors their credit.
3 Best Online Tools for Detecting Plagiarism
The plagiarism checker of Prepostseo is a great tool to check for duplication in your essay. This tool checks your content against billions of online sources to detect plagiarism.
The method to use this tool is very simple. All you need to do is enter your essay into the input text box. You can also use the “Upload” option to choose the file from your device and upload it to the tool. You can also import files from your Google Drive if you wish.
Once your content is imported to the tool, you need to complete the captcha and press the “Check Plagiarism” button. The window will scroll down a little bit and after a few seconds, the tool will show the output.
A graphic will show the percentage of plagiarized content and a text box will show the text that has been duplicated underlined in red. A list of all the source URLs will also be shown so you can see where the content was pulled from.
This tool is free to use and requires no registration, but as a side effect, it only lets you check 1,000 words for free. However, its results and accuracy are reliable.
Plagium
The plagiarism checker by Plagium is an effective tool for detecting duplication in an essay.
It is a free tool and can be used without an account. However, it only lets you check 1,000 characters per query. This is a very small character limit, and that means you will have to break your essay into chunks to check it for plagiarism.
This tool is pretty easy to use.
There is a very conspicuous text box, bordered by black in which you have to enter your content. You can paste it in there or type it out if you like. Once you are done with that, just click on the “Quick Search” button.
The tool will process your text and compare it to online sources and at the end of the check, you will see a list of all publications from which your content might have been copied from.
There are no graphics that instantly show the percentage of plagiarism, so you will just have to deal with that.
The plagiarism checking tool of Check-plagiarism.com is a great tool. It has the most relaxed word limit of the three tools in this list and it also provides great results.
Just like any other good plagiarism checker, this tool checks your work against billions of online sources and publications. Any duplicated content is flagged so that you can edit it out later.
To use this tool, you can either paste/type your content into the text box, which is in the center of the screen, or you can upload a file from your device storage. After uploading/pasting, press the “Check Plagiarism” button. The tool will compare your essay with online sources and then below the input box, you will see the results.
The output shows the percentage of plagiarism, the sentences that are plagiarized or unique, and the source URLs from which the content has been taken.
This tool is free to use, needs no account, and has the biggest word limit among the three (2,000 words). Its results are accurate and reliable as well.
Conclusion
Avoiding plagiarism is not a difficult task. If you take the proper precautions, you can avoid plagiarism quite easily.
Just make sure to do your research and use multiple sources. Use citations and quotes to use other people’s ideas to support your work and give the author’s their deserved credit.
Using tools is a great method of detecting plagiarism and plenty of free tools exist that can be used even by students.
Use these tools and the aforementioned advice to avoid plagiarism in your essay writing.
