Copying and pasting texts can help you save a lot of time when it comes to submitting assignments.
Regardless of what kind of essay or assignment you need to submit, many students find it easier to simply copy and paste sentences, paragraphs, or even entire texts from other sources.
However, how can you do that without plagiarizing? Plagiarism refers to copying someone else’s work, and if your professor finds out that you’ve been plagiarizing, they will likely reject your submission and fail you.
They may even apply disciplinary measures as punishment for plagiarism. Here are the best ways to copy and paste a text without plagiarizing.
How to Copy and Paste Without Plagiarizing?
Use a Plagiarism Checker
The best way to avoid plagiarism is to use a good plagiarism checker and keep paraphrasing – changing the words and phrases you use – until the checker brings up zero matches.
There are many good plagiarism checkers out there, but it’s useful to know which one your professor or educational institution is using, so you can use it yourself.
Every plagiarism checker might bring up different results, so you may get zero results on your checker while your professor’s tool brings up results.
Some good plagiarism checkers include Quetext, Copyscape, and Grammarly. You may have to pay extra for some plagiarism checkers, but it’s worth it, as it will save you a lot of time.
When you see a match, you should change the wording or rewrite the sentence entirely until it stops bringing up a match. Sometimes, changing just one or two words in a sentence will cause the tool to not bring up a match anymore.
This method is a bit tedious, but it’s the best one, as it ensures your end result looks like it was written by a human and does not bring up any red flags when it is run through a checker.
Use a Rewriter or Spinner
Another option is using an article spinner or rewriter tool. There are many free and paid ones on the internet, with varying degrees of effectiveness – many students use Quillbot’s paraphrasing tool, which is one of the best rewriting tools on the market.
Quillbot also has a plagiarism checker built in. Another tool you can try is Best Rewriter.
The free ones don’t tend to be as good as the paid ones, but most spinners have a flaw: the wording often sounds unnatural. It’s hard for a spinner to truly rewrite an article to make it sound like a human wrote it.
On the one hand, using a spinner will help you save a lot of time compared to manually rewriting the article yourself and running it through a plagiarism checker time after time until you get no matching results.
On the other hand, you can’t just run it through a spinner and submit it immediately. Most likely, there will be at least a few sentences that sound a bit awkward or unnatural, and your professor won’t have a hard time figuring out what you did.
Therefore, after running it through the spinner, you will need to manually proofread and edit the article. You must make sure the wording sounds natural and human-written and rephrase sentences that sound clunky or off.
Then, you should still run it through a plagiarism checker yet again, just in case the article spinner did not rewrite it well enough. Most of the time, running it through a spinner will remove all matches of plagiarism, though that’s not the case 100 percent of the time, so don’t rely on it.
Print It or Submit It as an Image
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Another option is printing out the essay and submitting it as a paper assignment. Alternatively, you can take a screenshot of your essay and submit it as a PNG image if your professor allows you to submit it that way.
The reason for doing this is that it’s a lot harder for your professor to run the text through a plagiarism checker, especially when it’s on paper. They would have to type it word by word or scan the paper, extract the text, and run that text through a plagiarism checker.
In the case of an image, they would have to use an extraction tool to extract the text from the image and then run it through a plagiarism checker.
Your professor may or may not bother to do that, depending on how much they care about plagiarism and how much time they have on their hands. Many teachers simply won’t bother checking a paper assignment for plagiarism, while others will.
Therefore, you’re kind of taking a risk unless you know for a fact how your professor deals with paper assignments.
Also Read: Can Turnitin Detect Quillbot?
Copy the Main Points and Use Your Own Words
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Another option, instead of copying and pasting the entire text, is to copy the main points from the article and then rewrite it in your own words. You can copy either the headings or take notes, jotting down short sentences or summaries of each paragraph.
Then, expand on the notes you took. While the general flow of the article and the ideas in it will be identical to the original article, your professor will not be able to find out about it simply by using a plagiarism checker, as there are unlikely to be any matches.
This requires more work, but it doesn’t require nearly as much work as writing a whole article by yourself from scratch. You can skip the entire research part, which makes up the bulk of the work for many people, and you don’t even have to create a structure or outline for your article.
Cite Your Sources
When copying and pasting quotes or paragraphs instead of an entire article, you should cite your sources appropriately to avoid plagiarism.
Your teacher may have a limit as to how much of the article can be quoted, but citing your sources generally helps you avoid plagiarism, as you are giving credit to the original source.
There are a few styles of citing sources, so find out which one your professor requires and follow it correctly. You can also use a tool like Cite This for Me to generate citations (Cite This for Me also has a plagiarism checker).
In fact, you should always cite some sources in your article. Citing sources shows that you are a good writer who knows how to do research and pull information from a variety of sources; your professor will likely give you a higher mark compared to if you were to write an entire article with zero sources or citations.
Use Quotes
In addition to citing your sources, make sure to add quotations around anything you quote. That will mark the copied text as a quote, so your professor knows you are not trying to hide anything and are acknowledging that you copied that quote.
Of course, you can’t just copy an entire article and put it all in quotes; that’s quite ridiculous. Similarly, you can’t make quoted paragraphs the majority of your article.
However, you may be able to strategically use quoted sections to reach the required word count of your essay without doing as much work as you would otherwise have to do.
Alternatives to Copying and Pasting
Copying and pasting while avoiding accusations of plagiarism will usually involve some level of hard work.
You would either have to paraphrase copied sentences to avoid matches in a plagiarism tool or rewrite the article that the spinner you’re using generated to avoid having an end result that looks like it was written by a robot.
There are alternatives to copying and pasting, though, and they often require less work. Here are some of the best alternatives to copying and pasting while avoiding plagiarism and also avoiding hard work.
Use AI to Write an Article from Scratch
One of the best alternatives to copying and pasting while avoiding doing any work is using an AI copywriting tool to write an entire essay. This method is also very affordable, as these tools tend to be cheaper than hiring a writer to write everything from scratch, which is the next method we will talk about.
AI writing has been in the news a lot recently, with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. There has been a lot of talk about ChatGPT; many students have been using it to write essays, while instructors have been scrambling to find out ways to detect essays written by ChatGPT.
Don’t get me wrong – AI writers have existed for quite a while. Copysmith, Jasper.ai, and Copysmith have been popular for a long time.
AI writers have always been able to write articles, blog posts, and social media posts from scratch. The quality of the end result varies from one tool to another, and they sometimes require a bit of touching up to make the articles sound more human-like.
However, they tend to be better than spinners. A spinning tool needs to replace words and phrases with other words that have the same meaning, resulting in sentences that sometimes don’t sound human-written, as we may not use those words in real life and natural language often.
A spinner can’t just write a new article from scratch. It needs to retain the general flow and meaning of the original article, but replacing keywords with different ones can sometimes result in awkward-sounding text.
Since an AI writer can write the entire article from scratch, it doesn’t need to use awkward phrasing to avoid plagiarism. Therefore, the end result often comes out a bit better and more human-sounding than what a spinner would generate.
Nevertheless, it’s still worth proofreading the end result before submitting it. AI is evolving, but it is still not perfect, so there is always the risk of the article sounding awkward and clunky.
So, what sets ChatGPT apart from all the artificial intelligence writers that have existed until now? One of its unique features is its versatility and its ability to learn from instructions.
Not only can it write articles, but it can spit out music, scholarly essays, poems, and even write computer programs made of code. There’s a whole lot it can do, and it can be instructed to write about specific topics and can even hold conversations with you.
It remembers the text it has previously generated and can respond to prompts to change and improve the text. For example, you can tell it to write a poem but then ask it to use more sensitive language or write shorter phrases.
It can even write books! ChatGPT is a powerful tool that is changing the world of artificial intelligence.
Of course, as ChatGPT is becoming more popular, so are so-called AI detection tools. The market is simply responding to ChatGPT, and various software developers have released tools that are designed to detect content written by ChatGPT or other AI tools – Originality.AI is one such tool.
The problem is that these tools are still underdeveloped. A tool that is designed to detect AI is not that much better than AI itself.
These tools have high rates of false positives and false negatives. Articles written by ChatGPT will often slip through the cracks, while articles written by real humans may sometimes get a high score for AI, even though they were entirely human-written.
Some professors use these tools, while others recognize the dangers of relying on them, as they are often unreliable. However, as time goes on, they may get better at differentiating between human-written and AI content.
Hire Someone to Write the Article for You
Another option is simply hiring someone to write the essay for you. There are many essay writers for hire on the internet – various sites are dedicated to it, with reasonable rates, although you can also find essay writers on marketplaces like Fiverr.
99Papers is an example of such a site. Pricing starts at just $9.95 per paper, and there are experts in many subjects ready and available to write essays for you.
The end result will be an originally-written essay that has no plagiarism. Your professor will not know you have hired someone to write it for you.
The longer you have until your essay is due, the cheaper it will be. However, if you need an emergency turnaround service, you can choose the three, six, or 24-hour option on 99 Papers; other sites or Fiverr sellers may be able to give you a turnaround in just an hour or two for the right price.
Most sites will run your paper through a plagiarism checker and/or an AI checker to ensure it doesn’t get flagged for plagiarism or AI.
Another benefit of using such a service is that you can provide specific instructions for the writer to follow. You may also be able to request revisions.
On the other hand, it can be expensive, depending on the subject, how fast you need the results and the specific writer or service in question. Furthermore, you are relying on the expertise and knowledge of the writer; if they are not particularly good, you may not get a good score.
Your professor may also be able to detect that the writing style is different from your usual writing style and suspect that something is up.
Also Read: Resoomer Review
Is It Worth Plagiarizing?
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A question you have to ask yourself is whether it’s worth plagiarizing in the first place. Sure, it will save you time, but what are the potential consequences if you end up getting caught?
That may vary from institution to institution, and in different countries, they may treat plagiarism differently. It may also depend on the extent of the plagiarism – for example, if you plagiarized once, a warning or some sort of disciplinary action may be all that you get, but if your professor discovers a pattern of plagiarizing, they may take more extreme measures.
Keep in mind that in many schools, plagiarizing is treated very seriously. You may automatically fail not just the assignment but your entire course.
That’s not even the worst that can happen. In many schools, being caught plagiarizing is grounds for expulsion, so it may not be something you want to risk doing.
Hiring an article writer would be a better choice, as the article will be 100 percent human-written and have no plagiarism. It’s harder to detect, but if your professor does find out that you used such a service, they may treat it the same as plagiarizing.
Remember, plagiarism is never the only option. Many students resort to plagiarism because they didn’t properly prepare.
By making sure you start working on your essay well before the deadline instead of procrastinating until the last minute, you will not need to plagiarize. You should also make sure to study properly, so you are knowledgeable enough on the subject.
Remember, it’s better to get a bad score than to fail the entire course or be expelled from your university, so make your choice wisely. Plagiarizing is the easier way out, and if you do it correctly, you will not be caught – most of the time.
However, it only takes one mistake or one overzealous professor to discover your plagiarism and boot you from school, which could affect your career, so never use plagiarism as a first choice.
Wrapping It Up
There are a few ways to copy and paste without plagiarizing, but the best option is to paraphrase it until there are no matches in the plagiarism checker you are using. However, an even better option is to hire a writer to write your essay from scratch.
Remember, such shortcuts should not be your first choice. Try to work on the essay in advance so you have time to write it yourself.
