Did you know that there are currently at least 3.43 billion indexed pages on the Web?

With the expansion of the internet, plagiarism checkers became a necessity rather than a simple capric to protect the original content and its authors.

When creating relevant content, whether you write academic pieces or blog posts, you use reference articles to address critical information about the subject.

And sometimes, your content unintentionally slides into plagiarism if you use those references with a lack of knowledge or inspiration about the topic.

Likewise, when searching for unique, inspiring, and pertinent content, people quickly get frustrated when they see that one piece has many similar forms by different authors.

No one is a fan of copycats – readers should always be able to find unique sources of information, and writers should always provide uniqueness and originality.

Fortunately, today we have plagiarism checkers that will scan and index text for similarity matches that can help you craft such content.

Today, we'll discuss what plagiarism is and how it can harm the integrity of your writing while also exposing you to unwarranted penalties.

We'll also go over how does plagiarism checker work and how to continuously create unique, trustworthy, and captivating content that your readers will appreciate.

Let's begin!

What Is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is unethical action and form of 'stealing' someone else's idea, thought, or work and claiming it as your own.

You probably think, "I would never do such a thing," but that is precisely how unintentional plagiarism sneaks into your writing if you are not careful enough. 

That can happen to anyone because nowadays, the internet is flooded with content, and the possibility is high that many sentences you are composing are already part of someone else's article.

The bad news is that search-engine algorithms never sleep, and they do not have a power-off button, so you can't trick them into passing the plagiarism test.

If your writing schedule is tight and you want to create genuine content, it is always best to implement plagiarism checkers in your writing routine instead of rewriting someone's work.

But, before we get into how plagiarism checkers work, let's check how to determine if the way you construct your articles matches any of the following plagiarism types.

Different Types Of Plagiarism

It's critical to know which techniques or styles of writing fall under plagiarism purview to reduce the odds of getting into problems.

According to Enago Academy, there are  8 different types of plagiarism:

1. Complete Plagiarism — Entirely copying someone's work and making it your own.

2. Source-based Plagiarism — Includes misleading citation, data fabrication, and data falsification.

source-based-plagiarism-example

3. Direct Plagiarism — Copying and pasting a part of someone else's work onto your own. 

self-auto-plagiarism

4. Self or Auto Plagiarism — Repurposing segments of your previous content in another project.

5. Paraphrasing plagiarism — Rewriting someone's sentence(s) as your own, making some little word and grammatical changes. 

paraphrasing-plagiarism-example

6. Inaccurate Authorship / Misleading Attribution — This can happen on group-created content when someone does the work but does not receive credit, and vice versa.

innacurate-autorship-plagiarism

7. Mosaic Plagiarism — Interlacing someone else's phrases or language within your study.

mosaic-plagiarism

8. Accidental Plagiarism Accidental plagiarism happens unintentionally due to human error and faces the same penalty as purpose plagiarism.

accidental plagiarism-example

Now that we know who ‘the enemy’ is, let's see how it can affect our work.

How Can Plagiarism Harm Your Content?

Plagiarism affects all aspects of business, and it is also regulated by law as a form of infraction that can result in considerable fines and harm one's reputation.

For example, you could face legal action if you reference another author's work in your article or document without having the author's permission to do so.

Everything in content marketing revolves around writing, so don't underestimate the importance of even tiny product titles, which can also raise a flag of plagiarism if you don't  generate them carefully.

It's much harder to get your reputation back to a positive zero and gain people's trust once you're labeled a plagiarist than to incorporate plagiarism checkers into your writing process to warn of mistakes.

They are incredible assets that can always tell you which parts of the text you need to edit to stay inside the guidelines.

Let’s check how they can do that!

How Does Plagiarism Checker Work?

Plagiarism checkers are pretty straightforward to use — paste your text into the plagiarism tool, and it will give you the results with a press of a button.

That may sound simple enough, but many "gears turning" happens behind the scenes. 

Most plagiarism programs, including search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, employ the WEB crawling method to compare your material to previously published pieces.

Others use their own large libraries of use-cases that tools use as a reference to recognize plagiarized text.

You may wonder, "how can I get such distinct results from different tools for the same document?"

The answer is another question "what is a plagiarism checker comparing your document with?"

Plagiarism software uses 4 basic search patterns to determine whether your content is unique or not, such as keywords, phrases, content matching, and fragment matching.

They all start by splitting text into smaller chunks and comparing their elements according to the searching method.

1. Keyword analysis

This type of plagiarism tool is the most similar to a basic search engine that focuses on keyword location in your article.

If the keyword is in the same place as other articles, plagiarism software will register that as an issue.

However, this method has a weak point — you can easily bypass it with paraphrasing, but that does not mean that it will always be plagiarism-free.

2. Phrase Analysis

Phrase analysis has the same premises as in the case above, but the difference is that it looks for words within the phrase with the same word order

You can't rewrite some phrases because they are often used as transitions in the text and will always show in the same order, such as "in addition," "in other words," etc.

These words are excluded from plagiarism software recognition algorithms. 

The tool has a threshold that defines a minimum number of words in the same order required to flag it as plagiarism. 

3. Content Matching Analysis

The content matching analysis primarily focuses on the structure of the sentence and style of writing. 

If the structure, tone, and wording order within the text 'sound' too similar to published articles, there are high chances of a 'red' flag.

With this type of analysis, your content can often get false flags, complicating the writing process, but at least it can give you insights into which parts you need to change to establish total uniqueness.

4. The Fragments Matching analysis 

The fragments matching analysis, or fingerprint analysis, search the same fragments of your text that matches other content.

It will trigger flags for plagiarism even if you separate fragment order with a new paragraph or replace word order.

In other words, if you use someone's document and make slight changes, this type of plagiarism analysis will be able to detect a match.

Plagiarism checkers are a great asset in your writing process because they can:

  • Link the source of a matching text to understand the similarity match better.
  • Improves the speed of writing unique content.
  • Provide the similarity percentage with other articles to keep track of plagiarism issues.
  • Assist in the verification of your paraphrasing abilities.
  • Helps in complying with regulatory and ethical guidelines.

However, even though all these benefits sound fantastic, plagiarism checkers are not flawless and can often make mistakes.

grammarly-plagiarism-checker

Let’s check some practical advice on how you can avoid plagiarism and always generate compelling and unique content that attracts readers.

How To Create Plagiarism-free Content?

The first step in creating plagiarism-free content is to see yourself as the masterpiece creator instead of a rewriter of someone's work.

Your creativity makes your content stand out, remains relevant, and attracts a wide net of readers.

When you start thinking as an author of your content, it becomes personal — instead of routinely filling the word count, it becomes essential to reach those numbers and get acknowledged.

Penalties and ban from searching engines are not negotiable, and you start searching for your solution in articles similar to the ones you are reading right now.

To avoid plagiarism when crafting your articles, follow these simple rules:

  1. Write with your own words, because people love to hear YOUR opinion.
  2. Do your research on the topic to come up with original ideas.
  3. Always mention references that you use to back up the opinions you represent.
  4. Use citations when 'borrowing' other people's thoughts to respect their competence.
  5. Paraphrase your thoughts with rewriting tools to create coherent and effective sentences.
  6. Use plagiarism checkers as your originality checker.

If you follow these guidelines when writing your work, you will significantly reduce your chances of falling into a plagiarism trap.

But what about eliminating such possibilities for good?

For that purposes we created TextCortex.

TextCortex is a use-case module-based AI writing assistant that uses complicated algorithms to produce plagiarism-free and unique text with each creation automatically.

In simple words, each time when you want to paraphrase your sentences to generate a blog post, email, or product description, TextCortex AI writers will never develop the exact text twice.

Why is that?

Unlike GPT-3 module-based AI writing tools, TextCortext trains its AI writers to produce high-quality human-like content using a library knowledge base of 3 billion phrases.

As a result, based on the keywords you specify, our modules use best use-cases to mathematically generate unique word order into suitable content.

Furthermore, our modules are 10x-100x smaller than GPT-3, and can make 10x longer material with varying complexity.

We can confidently say that TextCortext generates 98% plagiarism-free content with 2% of creativity.

Not only you can create content at scale, but you can do that within any textbox online with the TextCortex Chrome extension.

Here's how its rewriting feature works in practice:

By incorporating TextCortex into your writing process, you will be able to:

  • Produce up to 10x more long-form content than you did manually
  • Create authentic pieces of text with each generation.
  • Produce high-quality material that sounds natural.
  • Generate SEO-optimized articles automatically.
  • Save up to 70% of your writing time.

If you want to build long-term content credibility that attracts more readers, download Chrome Extension for free and let TextCortex take care of all plagiarism issues while improving your writing skills.