How to Activate Microsoft Word's Plagiarism Checker

Whether you’re a student writing an essay, a professional writing some web copy for your site, or a blogger preparing a post, it’s important to avoid plagiarism. Not only is it bad practice to copy other people’s work, but it can also lead to various penalties and problems.

Microsoft Word has a helpful plagiarism checker, called the “Similarity Detector” built-in to help with this. Here’s how to use the Word plagiarism checker.

How to Use Word Plagiarism Checker

You can access the Word Similarity Detector in Word 365, Office 365, or Word for the web. If you’re using an older version of Word, like Word 2010, it won’t be available. So, check that you’re working with the right version of Word first of all, then proceed to follow these steps.

Step 1. Open the document you want to check for plagiarism.

Step 2. Find the “Editor” button. It’s in the top-right corner on the “Home” tab. Or, you can switch to the “Review” tab and find it there as well, on the left side.

Step 3. Click on “Editor” to open up the Editor menu. It’ll appear on the right side and show various bits of information about your text, including a percentage “Editor Score” and info about any spelling or grammar issues you need to fix.

Step 4. Scroll down in the Editor menu to find the part labeled “Similarity” and click the button marked “Check for similarity to online sources.” Then, wait a moment while the Editor scans your text against various online sources to see if any of it is too similar or directly copied. It’ll eventually give you a percentage score, showing how much of the text (if any) seems plagiarized.

Step 5. You can then review the text and hover your mouse over various sections to see which parts have been flagged for similarity. Then, it’s up to you to either cite your sources or rewrite and replace the offending sections. Note that after you make changes, your “Similarity Checker” score should decrease the next time you run it. You can run the checker as often as you like.

Benefits of the Word Plagiarism Checker

Here’s why you might like to make the Word plagiarism checker one of your go-to tools when working in Word.

Avoiding Plagiarism Penalties

Plagiarism often doesn’t go unpunished. If you’re a student and hand in a plagiarized piece of work, for example, you could end up with a fail grade or have to repeat the assignment. If you try to post plagiarized content online, too, Google can detect it, leading to a negative impact on your SEO and ranking.

By scanning for plagiarism and then removing sections that are copied from other sources from your work, you’ll be able to evade these problems.

Working with AI-Generated Text

Nowadays, there are many generative AI tools you can use to create content quickly and conveniently. You can ask an AI bot to write something for you, then copy it over into Word and continue to expand on it or edit it.

However, AI draws most of its knowledge from online sources. As such, it might directly copy certain passages or paraphrase info from the web. Using the Word plagiarism checker helps you avoid plagiarism accusations in AI-generated content.

The above is the detailed content of How to Activate Microsoft Word's Plagiarism Checker. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!