Question

I am having trouble with the works cited page on my research paper. I have it all finished but when I uploaded it to a website called blackboard, I had to upload it for my class, it said that the majority of my works cited was plagiarized and because of that and 3 direct quotes, which I cited, I have 27% that was plagiarized and I can only have 20%. Those are the only things plagiarized and I have no idea how to fix it.

Answer 1

Okay, this used to happen to me sometimes when I was in college. What is happening is too much material is getting flagged because it can be found verbatim on the Internet and sometimes on the school's databases as well. Here are some thing s you can do to fix it easily.

First, some checkers have an option to exclude your reference page. Since the Works Cited page contains phrases (such as the web address) that can be found on the Internet. This creates false flags. No instructor that I ever had counted the reference page toward your quoted material percentage. So if there is a check box to exclude that page, check it. If not go to the next step. After you have marked it to exclude that page, run the checker again to get a more accurate percentage.

Next, now 27% quoted material is a lot. That is over a quarter of your paper. Even 20% is a lot so your teacher is being generous with the percentage. Most of my college instructors did not want to see percentages higher than 15% and preferred less than 10% and I usually got my papers to around 5-7%. So what you want to do is go through and find quotes that you can change to paraphrasing. You still need to cite it as paraphrased material, but it will bring your quote percentage down. You only have to bring it down 7% so that shouldn't be too hard.

Also, I'm not sure how Blackboard works, but our checker would highlight all the places where quoted material was found. Be sure that you go through and see if there are any places it highlighted that are not quoted or cited. Sometimes we can regurgitate stuff verbatim that we read without knowing it. I've done this on numerous occasion. Chack for that stuff and if you find it change it to a paraphrase and cite it.

If your checker does not highlight the quoted material for you, post your document here and I will run it through my checker and send you a report.