Hi all! Do you check your writings for duplications? What tools do you use for that, if so? Just thought this plag check service might be of your interest to take a look: https://plagiarismcheck.org/ Designed to protect authors from accusations of plagiarism, this tool detects poor paraphrase, synonymization, word order and active to passive voice changes... No downloads needed. Sure thing, if you are a fiction writer, it might be not an issue for you. I write for web - blog posts, seo copywriting, articles to social media, freelance writing projects for b2b segment - that's why consider such tools a savior Hope my peers will find this thread useful.
I'm confused. If I write essentially the same thing in a couple of different paragraphs, that's a duplication, which appears to be something that this software (detects poor paraphrase) would help with. But that's a world away from plagiarism...unless I'm worried about plagiarizing myself?
It looks like it checks your work against a database to make sure you are not unwittingly ripping off another writer .... however I'm not going to buy/download anything that feels the need to tell me its reputable in the headline
When I edited a site that accepted contributions, we used software like this, although I can't remember which one. It was one a lot of teachers and college professors use for student papers. You'd be amazed at how many aspiring non-fiction "writers" cut and paste from other sources.
Eh? Eliminate plagiarism from MY writings? Like, I'm plagiarizing while not noticing it? Am I sleep-plagiarizing on those nights that I'm not sleep-robbing banks? Eh? Eh?
Don't forget sleep-eating. It does happen to songwriters, though. A lot. (ETA: Accidental plagiarism, not sleep-robbing banks or sleep-eating.) But mainly, the software is useful to editors, not writers.
It does happen a lot in academic writing, both accidentally and intentionally. For instance, in the field I studied in (physics and material science), a thesis typically consisted of a theoretical and a practical part. The practical part was your own work, research and data, so accidental plagiarizing was rare (intentionally it does happen, as well as outright faking). The theoretical part, however, contained a lot of technical descriptions that had been covered in someone other's work – like textbooks or another thesis. So you often mimicked other author's descriptions, because that's what you grew up with. The problem here was that there was no required classes on how to quote properly. That was only optional, and no one wanted to spend time with it. Papers for publication in scientific journals follow the same structure. It frequently does happen that the theoretical part is more or less identical over a series of papers, when the research had been done with the same set of machinery and the same team with a slow turnover of team members, i.e., writers. So one tended to always write the same stuff over and over, which of course is technically plagiarizing, both from yourself and your predecessors. But since it stayed in the 'family'... Then there are fields in which writing consists of tons of quotation, like history or literature. There are rules on how to quote properly, and how to credit quotes, but these rules are (or were) often ignored or applied very sloppily both by the writers and their defense committees, because sloppy quoting and crediting reduces the workload on the author and makes for easier reads. And in those fields there is actually quite a bit of ghostwriting going on, which of course is criminal. In natural sciences, like physics or chemistry, there is also some ghostwriting, but since you actually have to produce and include a ton of data which had been proven to have been acquired by you, this was often ignored, unless you got caught.
You may actually not be noticing it. None of our ideas are wholly original, nor are the words we use to render them. Which is another reason to have a very skilled editor read your work. My editor flagged a line I had written, that it needed to be an exact quote and have single quotes around it... "why," asked I. It turned out that I had paraphrased, and I might add improved on a line in Hamlet. As I've read Hamlet clean through twice, studied the play during a Summer Class while attending Cambridge, and created stage designs for a modern adaption of Hamlet at a local playhouse... it shouldn't have come as a shock. But, I WAS SHOCKED! If I were going to plagiarize someone's work I hope I'd be more sly than taking lines from Shakespeare. I have since deleted the offending sentence from my WIP... and you might be interested to know, the line wasn't original even to Shakespeare. He had himself paraphrased it from another playwright.
That is not unique to Hamlet, Shakespeare often borrowed from his contemporaries. I wrote a script that parses any text I give it and simply does a google search for it. This flags a few lines for me to check out manually. I don't do that often (maybe half of the short story contests) but it gives me a pretty good idea if I accidentally lifted a line from a song or something that's been rattling around in my subconscious for years. I think it's way easier to do by accident than most people think. Our thoughts and feelings are a mix of our own and reflections of others. I do remember doing it accidentally when writing a sci-fi story. My google result found a Carl Sagan quote that I guess I'd heard sometime in the past and stuck into my story.
Chicken, you have to cite me when you quote me. "Eh?" -Archer, 1989 Edit: Yes, I am 100% certain that I am the first person to ever have said that. Ever. Ever.
Jesus looked at his apostles and said "One of you will betray me." Peter looked at Jesus and asked, "Is it I Rabbi?" Jesus said no. Judas, who would betray Jesus said "Rabbi, is it me?" "Eh." - Jesus.
