DeVry University subscribes to a plagiarism detection service called TurnItIn (TII). Faculty have the option of using it or not using it to identify if a student’s submitted writing is too close a match to other sources. As you may have noticed, I have turned it on each week for your writing assignments, but have not paid much attention to the results until now.
This week, however, is a good week to help you learn how you can use TurnItIn as a revision tool. As I mentioned above, when you submit work to TII, it looks to see how closely your work matches that of other sources and flags it if it is an exact match. (TII is set to ignore passages in quotation marks and to ignore reference lists.)
Ideally, your work would be completely original, so there would be no flags. Your goal is a 0% match score. The lower the score the better. That means you will have little, if any, revising to do to address your use of sources in your essay.
Conversely, a high score means lots of flags, which means you should return to your essay to see if you can resolve the flags. There are two main ways to resolve a TII flag:
The ideal way is to express your sources’ ideas in your own words and sentence structure. As a college student, you are expected to master the material so you can use it to support your ideas. If you quote too much of your source material, the sources overpower your ideas and take away your voice.
To express source material in your own words, I recommend you review the flagged passages so they are fresh in your mind, cover up the original material and write from memory. Your brain does not store information word-for-word, but rather stores the gist of it. If you write from memory, you are statistically likely to express the author’s ideas but in your own words and sentence structure.
An easy fix is to quote the material. In some cases, such as technical definitions, some statistics, and expert opinions, it is appropriate to quote material. But you should quote sparingly.
A TII flag says in essence that you have quoted the material but did not indicate to your readers that you did so by using quotation marks. Add quotation marks in the appropriate places. Be sure to revise your sentence(s) to identify the source of the quote before the quote.
Regardless of how your resolve your TII flags, you must be sure to use author tags and citations before and after your source material to signal to your readers where these ideas came from. For more information on how to use source material properly, see Source Sandwich Visual + Example and Commentary (FILES: Week 5 Universal Live Lesson Resources Folder).
For more information on how to find and interpret a TurnItIn Report, watch this video: