What is plagiarism? And how can a plagiarism checker help?

Plagiarism is using someone else’s ideas, thoughts, and words without giving them proper credit. The word “plagiarism” is from the Latin root for “kidnapper.” It means theft of someone else’s words, work, or ideas and passing them off as your own.

Plagiarizers suffer consequences, whether you’re in an academic setting, copywriting for websites, writing a daily blog post, or writing fiction. Most colleges and universities either suspend or expel plagiarizers. And you may receive a Cease and Desist order for using someone else’s work online or off. Stealing others’ ideas, words, and thoughts is a serious offense.

Using ProWritingAid’s plagiarism check offers you the chance to join the conversation with your own original thoughts and ideas. Consider it your opportunity to add something new, fresh, and original. Running the plagiarism check helps you find your own voice: by learning to write from your own intellectual processes, you give power to your originality. You can only offer original ideas when you own those ideas, thoughts, and words.

Here are ways you could plagiarize—without even knowing it.

1. Using someone else’s words without quotations, thus passing it off as your own.
2. Using the information from someone else’s work without attributing it.
3. Paraphrasing your source in a way that’s too close to its original structure.
4. Copying and pasting bits and pieces from the internet without attribution.
5. Inaccurate citations that don’t explain in a footnote or in-text citation where the information came from.
6. Self-plagiarizing your own work previously published or used elsewhere.

The plagiarism check helps you identify instances in your work where you’ve used others’ thoughts, ideas, and words. This includes data, ideas, specific wording, questions, and more. Regardless of whether your source is published, unpublished, in print, or online, you cannot pass others’ work off as your own, even unintentionally. When in doubt, always run the plagiarism check.

Imagine the repercussions to your reputation and your future as a writer. If you write content for clients, you can irrevocably damage their standing in search engines by plagiarizing others’ work. If you write fiction for readers, you could face a lawsuit if you use others’ work without their permission and proper attribution.

How can you prevent plagiarism in your own work?

• Learn how to cite sources properly
• Understand how to paraphrase correctly
• Make sure you know your sources (you shouldn’t cite some internet sources—learn how to weed out those that are wrong)

Plagiarism is a habit you can pick up in school or college, one that can have a major impact on your career as a writer. It can start with copying someone else’s work when you forgot to do an assignment. Or you wait until the last minute to write a paper and end up plagiarizing a lot. Using ProWritingAid’s plagiarism check can help you break the habit. Learn to form your own powerful voice, your own thoughts and ideas, and a healthy respect for the work of others.

Why use ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checker?

You get a more powerful solution when you use ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checker. Our algorithm checks your work against more sources, including online and offline sources like databases of thousands of periodicals and articles and billions of webpages.

The software highlights all content that is an exact representation of other’s work. You can see where you’ve used someone else’s work verbatim. And it shows your percentage of similarity to another’s work to help you identify where you need to better paraphrase or use quotations.

The plagiarism checker will always succeed at identifying any instance of plagiarism. Sometimes you’re too close to your work to see where it might need citation or quotation marks and attribution to the original author. Let ProWritingAid find those instances so you can rewrite or cite them properly.

Finally, ProWritingAid, unlike other plagiarism checkers, will never resell your text to others. You maintain full ownership of your words. Make sure you read the Terms of Service for any plagiarism checker you’re considering. Then compare it to ProWritingAid. You may not get the same depth of coverage with other checkers, resulting in unintentional plagiarism.

The internet makes plagiarism easier. ProWritingAid makes it impossible.