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Plagiarism or paraphrasing has always been a threat to the safety of intellectual property and development of one's knowledge and writing skills.
While plagiarism in most cases refers to blind copying someone else's article, paraphrasing usually means to re-write a idea or concept in a way that the meaning remains same with the style and structure changed. With the availability of Internet it has turned to a wide spread problem.
Even students these days know how turnitin works, they are copying articles from the Internet and submitting them to the school as their own projects. But the way technology has made it easy to copy things, in the same way technology made it easy to detect them. In this sector Turnitin is the name of an upfront service.
Developed by an Information technology company iparadigm, Turtinin is a service to check plagiarism of contents. This service is actually an web based software which has some complex algorithms to find out if there's any matching contents available with the submitted one. Education institutions are usually the customers of this service.
In many institutions of many countries this service is used to check out the originality of their student's works.
Unconditional service in detecting original contents by this system has made itself so trustworthy to a high number of schools, colleges and universities.
Turnitin's complex function is powered by it's complex.
Turnitin has effective algorithms which are updated time to time to beat various tricks being invented by some dishonest people. But in most time the winner is Turnitin. Turnitin has a vast archive of articles from the Internet. These archive is created by the system automatically using the program called web crawler.
This program can access the contents available on the internet and systematically include them to Turnitin's archive. The essays or articles submitted by the educational institutions are also included in this archive. In this way students cannot copy other students work. If they do, Turnitin is going to flag them immediately.
Turnitin over time has expanded it's functionality to detect paraphrasing.
Many tricks shown on YouTube and found on many websites don't actually work. Some of them include using foreign letters, using different charracters, using white text in place of spaces making them invisible, etc. In case of using the forign letters and different characters tricks don't work as Turnitin also compares the foreign letters which looks like the common English letters and in many cases the characters used with a view to cheat Turnitin are avoided making it impossible to pass through with paraphrasing. Another trick which is suggested by some people also results to failure as Turnitin can detect abnormal word lengths.
However, Turnitin has gained an wide array of processes to detect plagiarized and paraphrased content which makes the instructors of schools and colleges happily examine their student's essays knowing that they are actually written by them. In this way students can improve their writing skills and they learn how to write plagiarism free articles too . That’s a win win for all.
Though sometimes Turnitin has been accused of causing some harm to students creating presumption of guilt and risking intellectual property by giving the government of united states of America the write to access the information and content of the students, it has been a trusted service all along and the user base of this service is also increasing dramatically.
Finally it can be safely said that Turnitin can detect paraphrasing and It’s earning fame doing this.