Unique content is not just preferred at college and university – it is required. Just as students have more access to data, professors have easy access to tools that help them check for plagiarism. Unless you submit unique content in your assignments, you can get into a lot of trouble.
This is not easy on many students. If you want to learn how to create unique content that impresses your teacher, you’ve come to the right place.
Check Every Piece of Content with a Plagiarism Scanner
This is, without any doubt, the best way for a student to make content unique. Unintentional plagiarism is a real thing, so even if you think that your paper is free of plagiarism, there might be some things that will pop in the plagiarism report. This is why, before you submit any paper for school, run it through an online plagiarism checker that will tell you if it’s original.
Running it through a checker can be very useful for the editing part, too. Not only will a checker tell you that your content has plagiarism, but it will point out to the parts that are plagiarized. You can use this as a guide for what you need to edit or remove, as well as a lesson for learning how to avoid plagiarism in the future.
Always Cite Your Sources
Whenever you want to use information you found elsewhere, you need to cite it. Students often struggle with this. They think that if they paraphrase the work of others, that’s not considered plagiarism.
plagiarism, but it is also easy to detect. Plagiarism scanners can catch word combinations and repetitive phrases and show your teacher exactly what you paraphrased.
That being said, if you are retelling someone else’s story or writing from a perspective from someone else, you need to always cite your sources – even when you paraphrase.
There are many different writing methods when it comes to introducing outside data into your paper. Since you’re writing your assignment for education purposes, you’ll need research and sources. From now on, if you want to avoid trouble in your classes and with your teachers, cite everything you insert into your writing.
Brainstorm Your Ideas First
On one hand, your essay will require some research data. On the other hand, it will require your own opinion, your arguments, and basically something that will convince the reader that you understand the topic. While you can’t do without research, you can’t base your paper solely on other sources, either.
Once you are done with the research, take the notes in front of you and brainstorm first. Not everything belongs in your paper. If you use too many resources to meet the word count, your paper will be mostly plagiarized – even if you cite your sources.
Look at it this way. When the professor scans your paper for plagiarism, they’ll check everything the scanner points out to see if you’ve cited the source. However, if all you do is cite sources and you don’t include any of your writing in the paper, the plagiarism report will show a huge percentage.
You haven’t really written a paper if all you did was rephrasing what others said on the topic and cited them as sources.
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Don’t Base Your Writing on Others’ Papers
If you base your assignment on a source you found or someone else’s essay on the same topic, it won’t be unique. Yes, you should use sources in academic writing, but only to support your idea and your arguments.
When you write for school, make sure to start from scratch. This means that you should do research and use a variety of sources, then sit down and write an outline where you’ll organize your thoughts – not someone else’s content.
Many students pick an essay or a similar piece of content, copy it into their document, and tweak it to speed up the writing process. This is a big mistake and it is highly likely to result in plagiarism, no matter how much you rephrase everything.
Why is it important that the content is unique?
Imagine this scenario – your teacher gets your assignment and runs it through a plagiarism scanner. They can instantly see where you got your content. This shows them that you didn’t bother to write the paper and you decided to steal someone else’s work instead. Just imagine how much trouble you’ll get into!
To avoid losing face with your professors, always cite your sources. Don’t steal other people’s papers or rephrase them in attempt to write faster. And most importantly, scan everything before you send it out in case you plagiarized something unintentionally.
