Crafting unique, clear, and creative content for essays is no less than a challenge for students. It requires loads of effort and time to meet the quality standards of essay writing. It is better for students to follow a strategic plan in order to avoid plagiarism while writing an essay.
In this article, we will discuss the most effective step-by-step ways to write a plagiarism-free essay with high quality.
First of all, let’s discuss what is plagiarism and why is it unacceptable. Afterward, we will elucidate on the ways to avoid plagiarism in essay writing.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism occurs when we do not change the wording, style, or structure of statements and passages that we collect from other resources to include in our content.
In simple words, when we copy phrases, sentences, and paragraphs from the writings of other authors then it is considered plagiarism.
Whenever you write something, you need to make sure that it is not copied from any other resource. Your content should be unique in terms of words, structure, and organization.
Especially when you write an academic assignment, it must be free from plagiarism, or else it will not be accepted.
Why is Plagiarism Not Acceptable in Essay Writing?
Plagiarism is considered “literary theft” which is never acceptable in writing. This is because you are not allowed to copy any other writer’s wording and present it as your own. It is unethical and prohibited.
You need to be original and unique while writing for your academic assignments including essays. Every piece of information that you include in your essays must be written in a unique way or else, it will cause duplication issues which for sure result in your assignment’s rejection.
The words you choose, the way you combine your words, and how you organize your information, everything contributes to making your writing plagiarism-free. Not even a single sentence should match any other resource because it will raise questions about your credibility.
What are Effective Ways to Avoid Plagiarism in Essays?
You can follow these strategic steps to ensure that your essay is free from plagiarism:
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Study Multiple Resources
Expand your research and study a wide range of resources relevant to your essay’s topic. The more you read, the more you find a variety of information. This way you get more of the statements that you can rewrite in a unique way.
According to this strategy, all you need to do is:
- Study various different essays on the same topic
- Collect information from other relevant resource materials
- Highlight important information from each essay
- Rephrase the highlighted parts in unique and improved wording
The important information that you highlight and rephrase may include a phrase, statement, or a whole passage that you find relevant and catchy to include in your essay.
Keep reading to find out the most effective ways to rephrase your content without compromising on context.
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Improve the Vocabulary
You must have heard of synonym substitution. It is a widely used technique for plagiarism removal.
Typically, students substitute simple synonyms in a text to make it look distinctive, unbeknownst the right way to do it. In order to get the most out of this technique, you need to make sure that you don’t only replace a few words, but rather improve the choice of words.
Your focus should be on improving your vocabulary. When you modify the diction, it not only eliminates the chances for plagiarism but enhances the quality of your writing as well.
Choose catchy synonyms to substitute the unappealing parts of your sentences and see how your essay’s content becomes unique, clearer, and more engaging.
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Change Sentence Structure
Following the synonym substitution, if you change the way your sentence is constructed, you can avoid plagiarism more substantially.
For instance, you are writing an essay and you have found some very informative statements about your topic. What you can do here is simply “restructure” each statement to make it unique.
You can follow any of these ways to change the sentence structure and remove plagiarism:
- Reorder the words or clauses within sentences
- Alter the voice of sentences
- Change the tense of finite verbs
- Expand or shorten the sentences
- Convert sentences into pointers
You just need to change the way the constituents of a sentence are combined together. If required then you can omit or replace a few constituents to restructure a sentence as well.
If you find it difficult to do then it is in your best regard to leverage an AI-powered tool to reword and restructure your sentences. Using an AI rewriter, it will take you only a second to restructure your sentences in clearer, better, and plagiarism-free wording.
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Alter Tone of Sentences
This is another effective way to avoid plagiarism. You can simply change the tone in which a statement is written.
The choice of word changes with respect to the tone you use to write a sentence.
It is basically about modifying the tone so that a sentence can become more clear and more unique according to the required style of writing.
For instance, you can reword and restructure a casual statement in a way that makes it more formal. This way you not only remove plagiarism but make it more suitable to include in your essay.
There are multiple writing tones that you can use to rewrite your sentences in an entirely different yet better way. You can make them more creative, fluent, coherent, or concise.
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Reorganize the Information
This is the most important step in plagiarism removal. This strategy requires you to change the organization of the content that you are writing for your essay.
Changing the wording only is not enough to avoid plagiarism. The overall layout should also be unique. You need to make sure that your information is uniquely arranged as compared to other essays.
For this, you can change the position of passages that conveys the most important information. This means that you can create a hierarchy to follow in your essay.
You don’t have to follow how others have structured their essay, just go with your own flow. Create a unique coherent text flow in your essay.
If required then you can reorder the information within a paragraph as well. Anyhow, you must be cautious about changing the place of sentences as it can disturb the cohesiveness of the respective passage.
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Check for Plagiarism
When you are done crafting statements to include in your essay, it is imperative to check for plagiarism.
There is a possibility that despite your best efforts, your essay might contain duplicate phrases, clauses, or sentences. This is why you should use an advanced plagiarism checker to analyze your essay to check if it is unique or contains any duplication.
Using a plagiarism checker, you will be able to ensure your essay’s uniqueness within a few seconds. In case, there are any duplicate sentences, the tool will highlight the sources to cite as well.
You can track the sources either for acknowledgment or to simply analyze the content with which your sentences match so that you can take the necessary steps to remove plagiarism.
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Acknowledge the Sources
The most important step on your way to avoiding plagiarism is acknowledging the source from which you have copied a statement to include in your essay.
It can be a famous quote or some other relevant statement that you find catchy enough to incorporate in your essay. Since it is better to use a few direct quotations in essays, you should not rephrase such statements.
You can simply use quotation marks to enclose the statements and cite the source for acknowledgment. You can mention the author’s name, journal title, or other significant detail in the citation. It is best recommended to follow a proper citation format such as APA or MLA style.
Related: Top 5 Paraphrasing Tools to Improve Content Writing in 2022
What are the Best Plagiarism Checkers for Essays?
You can avoid plagiarism only if you know which parts of your essay are duplicated. Therefore, you must scan your essay for plagiarism. This can not be done manually as all the databases are online. You need to use a plagiarism checker tool to detect duplication in your essays.
Although there is a variety of tools available to detect plagiarism, we would like to discuss the five most functional plagiarism checkers. The best plagiarism checkers for quick plagiarism detection in essays include:
Quetext
Quetext is the most commonly used digital platform with a powerful plagiarism checker for content writers, teachers, and students. If you are a student then you can leverage it to check plagiarism in your essays with ease.
Professional programmers have tailored this plagiarism checker using highly complex algorithms including deep research and speed recognition technologies. Its advanced AI finds duplicate content, generates citations, and improves writing skills with no glitches.
It cuts down the time required for quality assurance as it quickly detects whether the essay is plagiarized or unique.
Although it is a premium plagiarism checker, you can get started for free of cost. However, keep in mind that you’ll have signed up to use it more than once.
Prepostseo
Indeed, Prepostseo’s plagiarism checker perfectly exemplifies that this digital platform never fails to facilitate its users. Using advanced AI technology, its plagiarism checker takes no time to highlight whether your essay is unique or copied.
Specifically for writing and education purposes, Prepostseo’s plagiarism checker scan long-form essays with 100% accuracy and safety.
Once you enter your content and run the tool, it quickly measures your essay’s uniqueness and plagiarism score. In case there’s any duplication then it highlights each phrase and sentence that is plagiarized.
It enables you to detect plagiarism in 1000 words per search. This means that you can check at least two full-length essays for plagiarism in one attempt.
You can access it without any account subscription. It is free to use but with a word limit. You can upgrade to its pro-level if you want an increase in word count and would prefer an ads-free and CAPTCHA-free experience.
Grammarly
For sure, Grammarly is an all-in-one tool to meet the writing needs of students and researchers. If we specifically talk about its plagiarism checker then it is completely reliable to check for duplication in essays.
Grammarly features a highly-functional plagiarism checker so that you can easily avoid plagiarism while writing. If the Grammarly extension is enabled then takes only a single click to check for plagiarism when you are writing content for your essay.
Whether you are writing from scratch or have an already written piece of content, you can ensure its uniqueness by using Grammarly’s plagiarism tool within seconds.
It highlights lines that match other resources and tracks links to every matched source as well. When clicked on a source link, you can easily jump to the site from where your content has been copied. You can use the resource for citations if required.
If you want to leverage these advanced features then you will have to buy a premium plan. As you would need it for essays, it is best for you to get a basic premium subscription. Keep in mind that if you pay for it then you will have direct access to Grammarly’s writing assistant which means that it will help you write error-free, clear, and unique essays with no hassle at all.
Editpad
Editpad.org has made it a lot easier to ensure the essay quality in terms of uniqueness. It features a powerful plagiarism checker that works more effectively to detect duplication and track citation sources.
It highlights the plagiarism/uniqueness score so that you can understand better how well your essay is crafted. Moreover, it marks all the lines that contain duplication, enabling you to determine exactly what parts need to be rewritten.
It never fails to detect any duplicate phrase or sentence which means that you can rely on this tool for a quick plagiarism check.
You can use Editpad.org’s plagiarism checker whenever and however required. It is free to use without any time limit but you will be able to scan only 1000 words in one search. The word limit an increase in the pro version. There are many more advanced features to leverage if you subscribe to a pro plan.
Check-plagiarism
Check-plagiarism is another option to find out whether you have written your essay in a unique or plagiarized wording.
You can scan up to 15000 words at a time to check for plagiarism. All for free!
Just upload your essay’s full-length content and see how quickly it tells you about its unique status. It will take only a second to highlight if it contains any plagiarism.
It is reliable, faster, and completely safe to scan any type of written assignment including essays, thesis, and research papers.
You can become a pro user to enjoy unlimited plagiarism checking as there’s no word limit in Check-plagiarism’s premium version.