Check yourself before you wreck yourself: what online plagiarism checkers can do for you

The talented and long-established rapper Ice Cube claims that statement. Well, really it’s “yo self.” But to Google, it’s relative enough, and credit is given where credit is due.

 

Caveman 3 The cave boy of the age of stone, Margaret A. McIntyre Wikimedia Commons

 

While various digital applications and programs can help keep an ethical writer organized and presumptive, others claim they can discover the disingenuous.

“Plagiarism checker” services abound on the internet. Most function in a very similar fashion – you enter a section(s) of text from a document you want to be certain has not already been created by another author or pilfered from you, the “checker” scans all sources made available to it on the web, returning results to you in seconds. Since there are so many different versions, I thought it might be fun to explore them, and find out what they really know about all of those precariously-strung-together sentences that are floating in cyberspace, tethered to someone’s name…or freefalling.

The site plagiarismchecker.com relies on Google and Yahoo! search engine results to spot potential plagiarism. In a blank search box (surrounded by cluttered ad space and an outdated layout with the only information under the “New Resources” section dating back an entire decade), you can enter up a sentence or pieces of sentences from throughout a document. Google can only handle thirtyty-two words at a time, while Yahoo! works with up to fifty.

I tried to enter a sentence from an article I wrote for the Allegheny West Magazine’s January 2015  Moon edition, titled In search of Moon’s first residents:

“Earl, the most recent president of the Old Moon Township Historical Society, has had a lifelong interest in Native American cultures.”

Simple enough. What did Google say?

No quoted results were found. The Moon Township Historical Society’s website came up first. Then another township reference. Then things got abstracted and far-fetched quickly…Upper Mississippi River cruises… “Quaker Lady”…references to my article did not come up. I tried the Yahoo! search option.

Nothing pointing in my direction! Instead, articles from IN Moon township by IN Community Magazines (our competitor!) were listed. How rude.

So instead, I entered the article’s title and bingo. It’s first on Yahoo!’s list, and first and only on Google. Glad my work is kinda sorta out there, but this does nothing to detect or prevent plagiarism. Anyone could claim the following sentence as their own, as oddly unique to the situation I experienced first person as it is:

“Earl positions the milky, cream colored rock, known as Flintridge Ohio chert, carefully on the dining room table. His wife, Mary Ellen, sits next to large charts, black and white sketches outlining the particular features of Northeastern Native American spearpoints, arrowheads, blades and other tools, divided into timelines and tribes.”

Weird, and seems problematic. What if I try a sentence from a renowned publication, like this obscure tidbit from Orion Magazine’s November/December 2014 edition article by Leath Tonino entitled 7 Mountains I Did Not Conquer:

“Delicately, ever so delicately, I picked a line through the chaos.”

Google-bang-boom, Google brought up the exact reference in 0.54 seconds. It’s cool; I’m obviously not in the same league as Leath, but I did sit with a man trying to demonstrate an archaic form of tool making at his dining room table. It’s not mountain climbing but SEO you SOB, throw my name out there.

Sorry. I’m not sure what any of this means. I tried my “milky, cream-colored rock” deal in Grammarly.com Plagiarism and Proofreader next.

Grammarly is a great resource for all sorts of, well, grammar questions (and they tweet some pretty cute and oh-so “punny” grammar comics and cartoons).

 

 

The page is crisp, polished and intuitive, refreshing coming straight from plagiarismchecker.com. They claim to check your entered text against a staggering 8 billion webpages, and “instantly find and correct over 250 types of grammatical mistakes.”

Alas, Grammarly did not recognize me as an author. They were helpful enough to let me know “We didn’t find any plagiarism, but we found 4 writing issues.” Kick me while I’m down, why don’t you.

Honestly, I’m finding this too frustratingly fun to end here. Join me, Earl and that rock in my next post, when we try out more “anti-plagiarism” software, and hopefully come to some conclusions about what all of this implies.