Academic Writers Warned Against Using Turnitin for Plagiarism Checks

I was with my writer buddies last night for an early Halloween celebration and one of them told me that the company he works for had just decided to ban the use of Turnitin as a plagiarism checking tool for its writers.

Nope. That did not mean that the company itself was no longer using the service, they just asked their writers to stop using it. Apparently the company was already submitting the papers the writers were turning in for plagiarism checking to the same company, which was resulting in multiple plagiarism results for the clients. So the company, which claims to use turnitin without having to submit the papers to the database, decided that the writers should not use the service to avoid complications.

Why, I asked, were the writers checking their own work for plagiarism? If they were not confident that their work was original, then they had no business working in the academic writing field. If the papers these writers were turning in had more than 30% copy-paste quotes then in my book, the writer should have been fired. I know for a fact that my friend never uses more than 20% of quotes and no more than 10 percent paraphrasing in any given paper so we had a good laugh at this latest development.

Why was the company using turnitin anyway? They know that the company holds the information in their database, even when the user specifically asks them not to. Don't trust a paid plagiarism service to do what you ask them to. There is no profit in that for them. That is the very reason why I tell my writers never to check their own work for plagiarism and I tell the clients that plagiarism reports are useless.

All it does it negate the validity of the original paper that was written for them. There should only be one person checking for plagiarism and that is the professor. That way the paper truly gets submitted for a plagiarism check only one, avoiding all instances of plagiarism most of the time. Actual and properly referenced quotes and paraphrases may still come up but it won't be a big deal since these are properly referenced within the paper and bibliography page.

Company affiliated writers take heed, do not plagiarism check your work on your own. It will cause problems for you down the road.

I've been warning students about it for years; a writing service that advertises that their papers are run through "plagiarism checkers" or Turnitin are scam because the minute a paper is scanned, the content is stored and will be considered 100% plagiarized when the student / customer tries to use it.

I'm amazed that anybody who actually does this kind of writing for a living uses anything even remotely close to 20% quotes. That means the writer (or company) is copying and pasting as much as a full page out of every 5 pages delivered. In my experience, only students really struggling to fill a minimum page count use direct quotes in most of their essays. Typically, high school and college students try to string together a lot of block quotes throughout their essays, connected with very little original writing, mainly to reduce the amount of actual writing they have to do. It's almost never necessary to use verbatim quotes, let alone a whole page's worth of them for every 5 (or even 10) paid written pages. Unless it's for a literature project or a biography or some other type of project in which the actual words of someone else are particularly relevant, I probably use any direct quotes in maybe 1 project out of 10, let alone a whole page's worth of quotes for every 5 (or 10) written pages of every project. In my opinion, direct quotes are usually the mark of a rank amateur in this business. No offense intended specifically to your friend, because this is something I've explained here several times previously over the last decade.


Agreed. I've also asked this many times.

Writecheck is run by Turnitin and they state in the FAQ they don't add essays submitted via that site, though the service costs.

20% of quotes in any paper that is not for a lit class is absurd. If possible, I avoid using quotes altogether, especially in fields such as marketing, economy, history.....The only time a quote is viable if it directly references a situation that the essay is based upon, and even then, their use should be limited to as few words as possible. When I was in university, I would fill my papers with so much quotes that it was impossible to read through. There was barely any me in the work. Once I started writing papers for a living, though, I realized that was completely wrong. Thanks Michelle :)

Agreed with this. Personally, I don't ever use quotations not unless I'm specifically being asked for it. I ensure that my references are still on-point through in-text citations (paraphrased content, of course). Quotations, in my opinion, are also quite a lazy manner of trying to relay information. Quotations don't necessarily add anything substantive to the text. Not unless you're doing an extremely detailed journalism or investigatory-based content, I don't think it's necessary to use these types of things. After all, writing should consistently be about the analysis of the writer rather than anything else. The writer should make use of the paraphrased information by providing new sets of information that are derived from their own understanding of the text - and this is how you are able to create something that's more effective. It's only a plus that the paper will also come out to have lesser percentages in Turnitin.

Properly-cited direct quotes don't count as plagiarism and should be deleted from the file you submit for scanning so that you get back an accurate scan. That doesn't mean that there should be extensive use of quotes, but that's a different issue from plagiarism. Extensive (and unnecessary) use of quotes is characteristic of students and inexperienced fledgling writers struggling to satisfy word counts. I've seen undergraduate essays written by students that were almost nothing but large block quotes with very little actual "writing" (let alone analysis) in between them. Most academic projects don't require any direct quotes at all.

Here's a novel thought, why not just make sure that you use original sources, properly cite the information origins, and write properly developed and completely thought out discussions for the paper? That's the best way to avoid any plagiarism problems. If you,as the writer have the confidence that the paper you wrote is backed by solid, non-plagiarized information, not even a paraphrase of any sort, then you can confidently assure the client that the paper will pass any plagiarism checker. Writing companies should not be submitting the papers written for any client to any database for checking anyway. That's the main reason why these plagiarism checkers catch the plagiarism in the first place.