Whether you are a college student writing your thesis paper, a professional working on an article, or a writer crafting your best-seller, you understand that information today is just a click away. So, you have to make sure that your work is original and authentic. There has to be no room for plagiarism. After all, using someone else’s words and work as your own or without giving them credit can not only plagiarize your work but also damage your reputation. Besides that, you might also have to face legal consequences. Fortunately, you do not need to worry about how to check the originality of your writing online or offline. There are tons of tools and techniques that can help you verify the originality of your work and ensure that your paper stands out.
In this article, we will explore the best ways to check the originality of your writing online. We will discuss a few of the best plagiarism detection tools that use cutting-edge algorithms to check plagiarism. These tools compare your text against a wide range of digital depositories to see if there are any potential matches. Besides that, we will also discuss how essential citation and referencing are in the academic world. In addition, we will discuss how powerful paraphrasing is. Paraphrasing, basically, enables you to incorporate external ideas to support your work while maintaining its originality. So, let us learn how to check the originality of your writing online.
How to Check the Originality of Your Writing Online
Many people would agree on the fact that creativity often involves building something on an existing idea or knowledge. After all, one can be easily influenced by a good work whether it is an art or an academic work. However, if you do not reference your work properly, you might face severe consequences. Therefore, it is highly essential to ensure that your writing is original. If you are worried about learning how to check the originality of your writing online, you are at the right place. First, let us see a few key reasons why the world values original work.
- Intellectual Property: You might already know that plagiarism is the act of copying another person’s work without giving them credit for it. It is highly unethical and has severe legal consequences. Meanwhile, original work is always valued. It not only fulfills ethical standards but also demonstrates respect for the intellectual property of other people’s hard work and efforts.
- Intellectual Growth: When you are working on creating original content, you have to do a lot of research and think critically and creatively. Therefore, you grow intellectually. Besides that, you are also developing your cognitive skills and learning. Moreover, original content and ideas are one of the best ways to inspire people and change.
- Contributing to Knowledge: Whether you are a college student or a professional, your original work may require a lot of hard work and sleepless nights. However, it vastly contributes to the existing knowledge. Besides, scholars and scientists are always expected to come out with something original in their respective fields.
- Creative Expression: While working on original work, a writer gets the opportunity to express their emotions, experiences, and perspective. This not only makes their writing original but also relatable to readers. Economically, it feels relatable, it will sell. Besides, original writing usually challenges the existing norms and traditions with a new perspective that it offers.
- Unique Voice and Identity: Original writing lets authors build their own unique identity and stand out in the crowd. So, they can express their thoughts and ideas freely. It is extremely important for creatives, including artists and writers.
- Professional and Academic Success: In academia, original content or writing is a must. After all, original essays, reports, and research papers demonstrate your deep understanding of the subject. It also tells your readers that you are capable of contributing to growth and deeper work.
- Engagement: Whatever field you name, including journalism and non-fiction writing, original work helps the person build trust among the audience, connect, and engage with them more effectively.
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1. Plagiarism Detection Tools
In the past decade, plagiarism detection tools have emerged as a blessing for content creators, writers, and college students. These tools help them safeguard the uniqueness of their work and writing. Hence, in this section on how to check the originality of your writing online, we will discuss plagiarism detection tools thoroughly. Besides, we will also talk about a few of the best plagiarism tools that you can start using today.
If you want to ensure that your writing is 100% original, you need to check for plagiarism. Luckily, there are tons of tools available online that may help you not only check plagiarism but also get rid of plagiarised content. These tools check your writing thoroughly and compare it against a wide range of databases. The database includes all the previously published work, including academic papers, articles, research papers, journals, newspapers, websites, and other material found online.
Moreover, plagiarism detection tools are equipped with highly cutting-edge algorithms that are best at identifying similarities, overlaps, and matches between your and already existing work. If they find any similarities, they generate a detailed report and/or highlight those texts.
For instance, you are a college student working on your thesis paper about renewable energy sources. After completing your thesis, you decide to check its originality. So, you run your thesis through any plagiarism detection tool.
The tool, then, scans your paper and finds a paragraph that matches a paragraph from another research paper. Now you can rephrase or rewrite that paragraph and ensure that your thesis is 100% unique, authentic, and/or original.
Best Plagiarism Detection Tools
With the abundance of information, it has become extremely easy to access and name someone else’s work as your own. However, it has severe consequences. Besides, it is a highly unethical act. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that your writing is original and unique. One of the best ways to do this is to use plagiarism detection tools. Some of the best plagiarism detection tools are as follows:
a. Grammarly
Whether you are a student or a content creator, you are surely aware of how powerful Grammarly is. It is not only an expert in checking grammar and spelling errors in your writing but also does a variety of other things. For example, it checks the readability and plagiarism in your writing.
Just like any other plagiarism tool, Grammarly scans your writing and sees if there are any similarities across the internet. Besides that, it provides suggestions on how to improve your writing, avoid plagiarism, and enhance the originality of your writing.
For instance, you are writing a blog on healthy meal options for young adults. When you are done writing the article, you run it through Grammarly plagiarism checker and see that it detects a 5% similarity with another article on the internet. So, it suggests you some fixes. You can also choose to manually rephrase the plagiarised content and give attributions.
Best Grammar Checker in 2022 – Grammarly
b. SmallSEOTools
SmallSEOTools is one of the best tools out there. It not only offers a plagiarism checker but also various other tools and features. A few of their most common features and services are spell check, word count, image-to-text converter, online text editor, text-to-speech, reverse text generator, backlink checker, keyword position, paraphrasing, and many more. Hence, it is an all-in-one tool that not only students can benefit from but also professionals.
To check for plagiarism, you can copy and paste the text in the text editor. If you are using the free version, you can check 1000 words at a time. However, if you need to get done everything quickly, you can also get their premium version. Once it checks your writing, it gives you a score that indicates how original your writing is. Besides that, it also tells you where any sentence or paragraph has been copied from and if there are any similarities between your work and the extensive database.
Nonetheless, if you want to read more about plagiarism detection tools, make sure to check out the following article.
Top Plagiarism Checkers for Students and Teachers
Utilizing Plagiarism Detection Tools Effectively
If you want to use these plagiarism detection tools effectively, there are a few essential things that you need to keep in mind:
- Interpretation of Results: Once you run a plagiarism check, you might get a few alerts. It is crucial to understand these alerts. For instance, a small percentage of similarity does not really indicate plagiarism. Sometimes, common phrases, citations or references, or even quotations can come out as an alert if found similar. However, you should understand that they are not plagiarised content. Therefore, it is essential to carefully review if highlights before you decide to review your writing.
- Citation and Referencing: If you have taken any data from another paper or work, make sure that cite it properly. If references are not cited properly, plagiarism detection tools flag them as plagiarised content.
- Multiple Checks: If you are working on any important paper or extensive documents, make sure that you run multiple checks. It is essential to do this until you are confident about your writing.
Undoubtedly plagiarism tools serve as guardians of originality for writers and creators. They not only help them to write unique content but also safeguard their own credibility. Besides that, you can also demonstrate your commitment to your work by producing original and authentic content.
2. Citation and Referencing
Referencing is not just an academic formality but also a way to recognize other writer’s work and pay them homage. Nonetheless, citation and referencing have various purposes. When you properly cite your work, it brings credibility to your work. Citing your work is a good way to show that you have conducted research and come up with reputable resources to back up your arguments.
Besides, citation and referencing help you avoid plagiarism. Because referencing clarifies to your reader from where which idea or argument has been taken. In addition to that, references and citations allow your readers to trace back these sources so that everything is clear and transparent.
A Comprehensive Guide to In-Text Citations
Common Citation Style
There are a number of citation or referencing styles that you can choose from. Different institutions and fields of study recommend a specific style of citation. Nevertheless, here are a few of the most common citation styles that you should know about:
- American Psychological Association: The APA citation style is one of the most widely used citation styles and most prominently used in social sciences. Nonetheless, it is a well-known citation style because of its stress on clarity and conciseness. Besides, both the APA reference list and in-text citations employ the author-date citations.
- Modern Language Association: The MLA is usually used by people in fields such as humanities. Unlike APA, MLA employs the author’s page number citation in-text citations only. Therefore, it includes a works cited page at the end of the paper or document.
- Chicago: This citation style is also known as Turabian and it is commonly used in history and other related fields. It uses both author-date citation and notes-bibliography systems. Besides that, it offers a comprehensive explanation of the use of footnotes and endnotes.
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: Fields, such as engineering and computer science, widely use the IEEE citation style. It offers numerical citations in square brackets which match the reference list at the end of the documents.
Employing Citation and Referencing Effectively
Employing citations and references in your documents is one of the best ways to learn how to check the originality of your writing online. So, now that you know what are citations and reference lists, you are good to start learning how to employ them effectively. So, here are a few actionable tips that you should definitely check out.
- Familiarize Yourself with Citation Styles: Though there are many citation styles, you should familiarize yourself well with the most common citation styles that we have already talked about above. Thoroughly learn what they are, how you can use them, and their specific rules and guidelines.
- Keep Accurate Records: Whenever you take an idea or argument from a source to back up your arguments, you should note down every detail. It includes the author’s name, publication date and details, and page numbers. After all, maintaining all the records properly makes citing and referencing your writing not only more manageable but also easier.
- In-Text Citation: Whenever you use someone else’s work in your writing, you should definitely employ in-text citations in your text. But make sure that the in-text citations are similar to the entries in the reference list.
- Bibliography: Whether you are researching or writing, make sure that you compile a list of all the sources that you have used in your writing. Besides, make sure that you organize the list according to the citation style that you employ in your writing.
- Consistency: Whichever citation style you decide to use in your writing, make sure that you consistently use it throughout your writing. Use the same citation style for all the sources in your document to ensure that everything is uniform and easy to understand.
- Quotation Marks: Whenever you use a sentence or passage directly from the source without paraphrasing it, make sure that you enclose it with quotation marks. Using quotation marks makes it obvious that it is from another source.
- Online Sources: Other than quotation marks, managing online sources is crucial too. Whenever you use any idea, argument, or data from an online source, make sure that you include the URL and the date when you accessed it. Including the access, date is crucial because web content changes over time.
- Review and Edit: As a writer, you should understand that your work is not finished even if you are done writing. So, make sure that you reread and review your paper before you hand it over. You should carefully review everything, including grammar, spelling, citations, and references.
All in all, referencing and citations are not just a formality that you have to swear by in your writing. Instead, they are a way to ensure the credibility and originality of your work. Nonetheless, if you obey referencing rules and guidelines in your papers, you showcase your commitment to your work and integrity.
How to Add Reference Lists to a Research Paper – Complete Guide
3. Paraphrasing and Rewriting
Another effective how to check the originality of your writing online method is to employ online paraphrasing tools in your writing. Paraphrasing is a good way to reuse someone else’s story and rewrite it without damaging its essence. For instance, consider that you are telling your friend a story that you read somewhere. You can either choose to repeat the same story word-for-word or tell the story in your own words.
Meanwhile, you can tell the story in your own style but keep in mind that the meaning should remain the same. Or let us say that you read a cake recipe online and you loved it. So, you want to try it out yourself. You can repeat the same exact steps but change a few ingredients or use ingredients of different brands. Despite all the changes, the cake still tastes just as good.
On the other hand, rewriting means that you change the ingredients but also follow the recipe differently and come up with something brand new. In academic writing, rewriting is taking someone else’s ideas and arguments, changing a few things here and there, and making it sound like yours. Nonetheless, here are a few reasons why paraphrasing and rewriting matter:
- Avoid Copying: There is no doubt that an academic paper is never without sources. We all need to support our ideas and arguments with existing research and work. So, when you use another author’s ideas, words, and arguments without changing anything, it is more like copying their work. Whereas when you paraphrase or rewrite, you are mixing their ideas and arguments with yours.
- Respect Copyright: Even if you use another author’s ideas or arguments to support yours, you need to make sure to paraphrase and reference their work to pay homage and respect to their time and efforts.
- Making it Clearer: Research papers and official documents are usually complex and hard to understand. Paraphrasing allows us to rewrite the same content in simpler words so that anyone with no background knowledge can also understand it.
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How to Paraphrase or Rewrite?
If you wonder how you can start paraphrasing and rewriting to ensure that your writing still stays original and unique despite employing other’s ideas and arguments to back up your writing, you can follow the steps below.
- Understand the Source: Before you start paraphrasing any source material, read it thoroughly and try to understand everything. Make sure to understand the main ideas.
- Put it in Your Own Words: Once you have understood the source material and what you need to take from the paper to support your own argument, you can easily rewrite or paraphrase it in your own words. One of the best ways to ensure the originality of your writing is to not look at the source material while you are paraphrasing.
- Check for Similarities: Once you are done writing or paraphrasing, compare your content with the source and look for similarities. If you find any similarities that might come up as plagiarism later, rewrite it again.
- Give Credit: Even if you are paraphrasing or rewriting, it is essential to give them credit for it. So, make sure that you add in-text citations and reference lists in your paper.
- Practice: Like everything else in academia, paraphrasing and rewriting requires you to practice. The more you do, the better you become at paraphrasing or rewriting.
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