Plagiarism can be very harmful to writers. For academic writers and professionals, plagiarism can bring out various consequences and troubles that can even result in them getting expelled or fired from their institute.
On the other hand, for writers who have to create content for an online audience and purposes such as SEO, plagiarism can be very harmful since it can get them penalized by the search engine.
Considering the harms of plagiarism, it’s understandable that no straight and honest writer will perpetrate it intentionally. However, that’s where the biggest issue with plagiarism comes up. Even if you don’t deliberately commit it, your writing can still pick up some matches from existing sources and appear as ‘plagiarized.’
In this post, we will look at how writers can find plagiarism in their writing so they can remove it before finalizing their work.
How can writers find plagiarism in their content?
Before moving on with this post, we should clear something up.
Plagiarism cannot be detected manually. There’s just too much material available nowadays, and it’s humanly impossible for a person, or even a whole population, to check to find matches in a piece of content manually.
This is why we use checking tools nowadays. These checkers essentially take the given content and scan it against a database to see if there are any matches between the two. If there is a match between the entered content and the documents/texts in the database, then that particular paragraph or sentence is highlighted.
Finding plagiarism in a piece of written content is easy enough. However, to simplify it, we’ll describe it in the form of easily followable steps.
1. Find a Good Plagiarism Checker
The first thing you have to do to check your content is to pick a good plagiarism checker. Many are available online, and quite a few provide reliable results. A good option is plagiarismchecker.ai, where you can upload your content and get the results in seconds.
The best way to choose a good checker tool is to simply look up guides and blog posts by typing in things like “best plagiarism checkers in 2022” or “best plagiarism checkers for content creators,” etc.
A good checker has the following features:
- It is free to use (unless you have a recurring need, buying a paid subscription isn’t worth it)
- It provides reliable results (this can be ascertained by doing some test checks)
- Has useful features such as file uploading and downloading
- Has a quick working
2. Import Your Content to the Selected Tool
The next thing that you have to do after selecting a tool is to import your content to it.
Depending on the tool you’ve selected, there can be different ways and methods in which you can import your content. For example, some tools let you enter the content directly into the input field by typing or copy-pasting, whereas others let you upload a file directly from your system storage.
So, depending on your chosen tool, you can use the provided importing options to fetch your content.
3. Start the Process and Check the Results
After the content has been imported, you can go ahead and start the process. Depending on the tool that you’re using, you may or may not be required to run a captcha beforehand.
The plagiarism-checking process usually takes some seconds to complete. Some tools can take a lot longer than others.
Once the process is complete, you should take a look at the results to see whether there is any plagiarism in your work or not.
How can writers eliminate plagiarism from their work?
There are different steps writers can take to eliminate plagiarism from their work. Assuming that the results show that there are bits of duplication in the content, the following are some of the steps that writers can take:
- Remove the plagiarized bits altogether
- Finding the source and adding a citation to accredit them
- Putting the plagiarized parts in quotes and giving credit to the original source
Conclusion
Plagiarism is about one of the worst things that can show up in your writing. With it, there can be a lot of consequences that you can face.
While we won’t delve into all those now, suffice it to understand that those consequences are not something you want to deal with.
A plagiarism checker helps you avoid getting recognized as plagiarized.
