What is Plagiarism? – Catch it and Avoid it
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Whether you are a student or a web content writer, you can’t overlook the importance of generating unique content. However, if you don’t take it seriously, you are much more likely to face uncalled-for consequences. As a student, you may face an inquiry, disciplinary actions, and even rustication if your content is found to be plagiarised. As a web content writer or digital marketer, you will end up disturbing the SEO of your website and facing penalties in the form of non-indexation or lower SERP rankings. You will also lose a significant chunk of traffic from your website as the modern-day audience finds it offensive to get served with plagiarized content.
Considering the scenarios above, it is apparent that you need to make your content free of any kind of plagiarism, be it deliberate or accidental. However, many people don’t know what plagiarism is, how it occurs, and what is required to eliminate it. If you want to create unique content, you must know the definition of plagiarism, its basic types, and the reasons behind plagiarism. You also need to know the method to determine the uniqueness of your content and, above all, the safest way to avoid it. If you don’t know any of the things mentioned above, then you are lucky because this article will help you get aware of these things and help you avoid plagiarism. Read on to know more.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism, according to its very basic definition, is picking or stealing someone else’s ideas or words and presenting them as yours. This act lacks credit to the original author, which is why it is not appreciated on any level across the globe. Academic institutions around the world have implemented strict policies against the act of plagiarism because it is immoral and unethical. However, in the old days, plagiarism was common on the internet.
Many website owners used to pick write-ups from other sources and publish them under their portfolio without giving the due credit to actual authors. However, things have changed these days significantly. People are more aware of plagiarism and consider it an unethical action. Above all, Google and other search engines have updated their algorithms to identify websites involved in plagiarism and started penalizing them as they consider it a compromise on user experience.
Why Plagiarism Occurs?
Generally, there are two types of plagiarism, deliberate and accidental. The names of both types pretty much say it all. There could be multiple reasons behind the occurrence of plagiarism. However, we will discuss a few of them. Further details are given below:
Research from Limited Sources
Writing anything requires you to allocate significant time for the research process only. However, it is often observed that people don’t do that while writing an assignment, thesis, blog, article, or white paper. Relying on a limited number of sources for the required information may result in redundancy and duplication, ultimately leading to accidental plagiarism in your content.
Procrastination
Procrastination is one of the main reasons behind plagiarism (Both deliberate and accidental). It is often observed that people who are assigned the task of articulating a write-up, whether it is for academic or professional purposes, keep on procrastinating it. This process continues until the time of submission or publishing is just around the corner. This is when they look for shortcuts to get the task done and include content from other sources.
Similar Writing Style
Another reason behind the inclusion of similar content is the similar writing intent or style. You will be one of many to write on that very topic. Many other people may have also written on a similar topic. So your writing intent may match someone else. Hence, plagiarism in your content is possible because of a matching writing style.
How to Find Plagiarism in Your Content?
Gone are the days when you had to manually match your writing with the sources you used for research. Technology has an easy and effective solution to help you determine your content’s uniqueness and detect plagiarism patches. You can use an effective AI-based plagiarism checker for this purpose. They use advanced technologies and an extensive database to check plagiarism (if there is any) in your content. Such a tool will show the uniqueness of your content in percentage. It will also show the URL of sources with similar content to the plagiarized part of your content.
Safest Way to Get Rid of Plagiarism
Now that you know the method to figure out the plagiarized part in your content, you must be looking for a way to get rid of plagiarism. You may try to rewrite the content manually to get rid of duplication. However, this approach may induce uncalled-for mistakes in your content, such as vague sentences, spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The safest way to get rid of plagiarism is using an advanced AI-based paraphrasing tool for this purpose. A paraphrasing tool will scan the entire content to understand its meaning. Once the whole process is done, it will make significant changes to the content and try to make it unique by replacing words with meaningful synonyms that will fit the context perfectly.