Topic outline
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Passages of highlighted text
The highlighted content in an Originality report shows you where your phrasing matches another source too closely.
In the example below, the writer has directly lifted the highlighted text from a film review. In addition, the original source has not been acknowledged via in-text referencing. Directly lifting content from other sources and presenting it verbatim in your assignments is considered plagiarism, unless you have both quoted and referenced this text (and even then you should quote sparingly).
This would be considered plagiarism by your markers. You therefore need to paraphrase or summarise this content into your own words to demonstrate you have understood it, as well as provide a reference to the source.
The next example is an example of poor paraphrasing. The writer has directly lifted the highlighted text from a webpage, only changing a few words here and there (as shown by the gaps between the highlights). You can see that these changes are only superficial: the writer has not demonstrated that they have understood the material as they have not attempted to thoroughly translate it into their own words. So Turnitin still identifies this text as being similar to another source and, more importantly, your marker will too. The original source has not been referenced either, so this would be considered plagiarism.
In the next example, the writer has directly lifted the highlighted text from a journal article, but they have provided an in-text reference. Although the reference acknowledges the source of this information, this would still be considered plagiarism because the writer has not paraphrased the content or indicated with quotation marks where content has been copied directly.
Sometimes the passages of text highlighted will be long, as in the examples above. At other times, they might only be a few words. Either way, you should read all highlighted passages carefully and check them past their sources to see if you need to change anything, and then change as required.
