Writing essays is an inescapable vice of school life. As such many students try to cheat their way through them and get burned. The most common form of cheating on essays is plagiarism. Students go online and find an essay on a similar topic as theirs and copy-paste it with minimal changes.
This kind of plagiarism is easily caught with the help of tools. As such students get punished in a variety of ways.
Today we at PDF Study Materials will teach you how you can actually remove plagiarism from your work and avoid the punishments associated with it.
But an important disclaimer first, we are not showing you how to cheat effectively. We are only showing you how to write your essay ethically.
Steps for Removing Plagiarism from Your Essay
Plagiarism can occur for various reasons. It is quite common in academic writing to use the works of other people as supporting arguments in your write-up. But that can sometimes lead to plagiarism.
The most common reason is failure to paraphrase properly or incorrect citations. Anyhow, we will show you how you can detect and remove such plagiarism from your essays.
- Check With a Plagiarism Checker
Step 1 is pretty easy. All you have to do is to check your essay with a plagiarism-checking tool. A plagiarism checker is a tool that can compare your essay with other textual sources on the internet. Most plagiarism checkers can compare against millions of sources. The more sources they can compare against the more accurate they are.
For this article, we chose a free tool called Check-Plagiarism for detecting plagiarism. You can use the same tool, or you can look for another one. They are pretty easy to find and use.
Now, we will take a part of this article and append it with part of a published article. this should show up as plagiarism in the tool. The article that we are going to use is taken from the Shopify blog.
As expected, all the parts taken from the Shopify blog have been flagged as plagiarized.
The same will happen when you check your essay. Any plagiarized parts will be detected and highlighted in some way. This takes us to our next step.
- Scrutinize The Sources
Any good plagiarism checker will provide you with the sources of the content that has been plagiarized. In our case, the plagiarism checker shows us the correct source which is an article from Shopify.
Now, you cannot just accept these sources at face value. You have to scrutinize them. That is necessary to decide whether the plagiarism is due to:
- Similar wording only
- Similar ideas and content
Depending on if one or both are true your approach will be different. In our case, we copied some guidelines only. Guidelines for multiple websites can be the same. So, our case is of “similar wording only.” In this case, just changing the wording significantly will remove plagiarism.
But for discussion’s sake, if the second point were true, then we would have to cite the source instead. And if both points were true then we would have to cite the source and reword the content.
- Use The Plagiarism Remover
Since our case is one of similar wording only, we can safely remove plagiarism by changing the wording and sentence structure of the content. To do that we can either:
- Attempt it manually.
- Or use a plagiarism remover.
A plagiarism remover is a type of tool that can well remove plagiarism from any given text. However, it must be noted that it can only remove plagiarism if it is due to similar wording.
There are many plagiarism removers available on the internet. You can find one by simply Googling it. For our demonstration, we picked out a tool that is good to use and is free. It is literally plagiarism remover too, talk about being on the nose.
Anyhow, we will now change the plagiarized part of the content using this tool. We ran it through the tool and got the following results.
It can be seen that bits and pieces of the text have been altered. The changed parts are bold. But as you can see some of the text seems very slightly nonsensical, so you need to proofread the output of the tool. Improve it grammatically, and then move on to the last step.
- Check With the Plagiarism Checker Again
Even if a tool claims that it has made a piece of content “plagiarism-free” we cannot be sure. That is why the final step is to check the content again with a plagiarism checker.
If the degree of plagiarism is reduced significantly then that is good, otherwise, you will need to rerun the text through the plagiarism remover.
So, here are the results of the double-check.
Splendid, a 98% unique result. This means that plagiarism has been drastically reduced from the content. So, this approach is an effective way for removing plagiarism from essays that have plagiarism due to similar wording.
Conclusion
And that is how you can remove plagiarism from all types of essays. Avoiding plagiarism is really easy to do because of the tools. We demonstrated how you can use two types of tools to detect and remove plagiarism from an article. You can apply the same steps to detect and remove plagiarism from an essay.