You finally submitted that wonderful writing you worked on for the entire semester to your Professor expecting high praises to compensate for all the lonely nights in your dorm when your friends were partying.
But. Wait. You failed! And for the most unexpected and horrible reason possible!
Plagiarism! or copy-paste
But you swear you never copied from anyone or anywhere. Then where did that 60% plagiarism even come from?
Well, you might get tensed for the first time, caught by a professor of copy-pasting. But, an overwhelming amount of literature available today makes plagiarism quite (pun intended) inevitable. After all, there are only so many different ways that you can write the same information.
When you copy the content or present somebody else works without giving credit, that is plagiarism. But, being human, we are all liable to commit plagiarism without ever realizing it. Say you have been going through several research articles for your term paper, and you think –Let me paraphrase this section and add it to my work. You didn’t realize that the words might be yours, but the idea belongs to someone else.
Scientists have been analyzing this phenomenon, named cryptomnesia, wherein people believe their ideas originated from their creative instincts but have copied from some bygone memory of another work.
But, despite all the efforts, there still needs to be a clear distinction between what can be considered plagiarism and what can be exempted. So, the question that must be answered is
“How much plagiarism is allowed?”
Various entities have mandated different tolerance levels for the level of plagiarism found in a manuscript.