How Can You Avoid Plagiarism in 2025

We all know that Plagiarism is taken seriously in academic writing, and you should know how to recognize it. There are times when original work gets plagiarized one way or the other. For such a moment, you should know how can you avoid plagiarism. 

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is intellectual theft. It is an action where you use someone’s published work without giving them credit. It can be intentional and unintentional alike. Your original work can be falsely flagged as plagiarized. There are times, in professional and academic settings, that you rely on evidence and sources, so you end up copying someone else’s words by mistake. 

The most interesting instance of plagiarism in recent times is when Melania Trump’s 2016 speech was accused of stealing words from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech. The unforgiving public outcry criticized the speechwriters for copying the speech.

This guide provides practical tips to avoid plagiarism and how to reference the original creator of the work. 

Types of Plagiarism

There are multiple kinds of plagiarism. We have discussed all of them in this write-up:

Direct Plagiarism: Direct plagiarism refers to the action of copying someone’s work line by line without any proper citation and quotation marks crediting the originality.

Self-Plagiarism: It might sound bogus, but self-plagiarism is when you reuse your published work.

Accidental Plagiarism: Accidental plagiarism refers to the use of misquotes or a lack of citations.

Bluffing: Making up quotes, sources, and citations to back your credibility. It shows dishonesty.

Aggregator Plagiarism: This kind of plagiarism is identified when your paper is full of paraphrased content, quotes, and sources without any original input.

Patchwork Plagiarism: Plagiarism is considered ‘patchwork’ when a work has multiple pieces of content from various sources merged to create a new paper.

How can you avoid plagiarism with referencing and citation styles?

Citing sources and referencing play an important role. 

There are many citation and referencing styles, some of which are mentioned below:

• APA referencing style
• MLA referencing style
• Chicago style referencing
• AMA referencing style
• Turabian referencing style
• Harvard referencing style
• MHRA referencing style
• OSCOLA referencing style
• Vancouver referencing style

The APA Referencing Style is commonly used in Social Sciences like psychology, while the MLA Referencing Style is used in humanities like literature and languages. The Chicago Style Referencing is also commonly used in historical subjects.

How can you avoid plagiarism in 2025? Here are Some Common Strategies

Now we are going to discuss some ways of paraphrasing techniques to avoid plagiarism in this blog:

What are some commonly used Paraphrasing techniques?

The following are some commonly used paraphrasing techniques that can help:

Change Sentence Structure

Rearrange the sentence structure without losing the meaning.

Change Active voice to Passive voice

Change the voices from active to passive. This technique has helped many.

Break Longer Sentences into Shorter Parts.

Split longer sentences into shorter parts or just use different short sentences to write a longer one.

Change Word Forms

Change parts of speech in your writing. 

Change the Perspective

Change the point of view or perspective of the sentence to make changes.

Simplify Complex Sentences (or Write Them with More Detail)

You can simplify a complex idea by making a sentence longer and writing it with more details.

Use Examples or Analogies

Replace direct statements with examples or analogies to illustrate the same idea.

Avoid Overlapping Phrases

Rephrase idioms, expressions, and repetitive phrases with different terms.

Summarize the Content

Rewrite longer sentences into shorter ones while keeping the context. In short, summarize the text.

How can I use AI tools for Academic Writing in 2025

Nowadays, a lot of people are using AI to write new content and end up writing plagiarized or AI-written text. The most common misconception among people is that they can use AI tools to generate a complete paper or blog. Yes! It is possible, but writing using AI will remove the human intent from your text, and someone can tell just by looking at it. Some of them are discussed below:

Grammarly:

As the name suggests, Grammarly can be used as a writing assistant for checking spelling and grammar mistakes in your text.

ChatGPT:

ChatGPT can be used as a tool for research and angles, but it cannot be used as an alternative.

WriteSonic AI:

As the name makes it obvious, WriteSonic AI is a generative tool that can write text-based content. It is used by a lot of people to generate blogs, articles, and social media posts.

But for the AI part, it can be used to get a structure, but not for the whole content.

The Role of NLP in Academic Writing and Research

NLP (Natural Language Processing) is a branch of artificial Intelligence that focuses on how AI understands and interprets human-written text. Think of it as teaching machines to “read” and “write” like humans do.

It plays the part of a bridge between complex AI-written text and human understanding. NLPs are natural language phrases that are used by researchers to analyze large volumes of text. A lot of tools these days are powered by NLP to improve the writing quality and structure of AI-written text.

How Marsha Improved Her Grades Using a Plagiarism Checker

Marsha was struggling with her essays, and despite her hard work, it almost seemed impossible that she was going to score good grades. 

Then a professor pointed out that her essays and research papers had plagiarized content, but she didn’t know how it happened it was unintentional plagiarism. She often used to think which part of it was plagiarized. Marsha needed something reliable to help her make sure that her work was original and 100% unique. Marsha used Grammarly for plagiarism checking in her research paper. It flagged all the content that closely resembled other sources on the web.

Marsha saw a noticeable improvement in her grades after this. Her problem was solved, and so can yours be by using plagiarism checkers.

Here are some of the best plagiarism checkers available on the web:

• Turnitin: It is a plagiarism-checking service that compares a student’s written work to a large database, identifying potential and common mistakes.
• Grammarly: It is a writing assistant that uses AI to help improve your writing.
• Check My Assignment: A tool that can be your perfect writing assistant as well as your plagiarism checker, and the best part is their ‘New Year Sale‘ is still on, giving you 15 days of free usage on signing up!

FAQs

How do I avoid plagiarism with the golden rule?

The golden rule of plagiarism states, “When in doubt, always cite.” This helps you avoid unwanted plagiarism. This is how you can avoid plagiarism without losing meaning.

Is the 80/20 plagiarism rule helpful?

It is quite helpful. The 80/20 rule in plagiarism means that 80% of your work should be original and human-written. Only that percentage gets you a pass. Anything below that is problematic.