Turnitin, a tool in Canvas, is used by some instructors at Phoenix College to check for plagiarism and encourage academic integrity. While its almost impossible to get a 0% score for a research paper, here are some tips to lower your score:
- Are your own words too similar to the original? Try completely changing the sentence structure without losing the original meaning. Your instructor wants to hear your voice. Use vocabulary that you're comfortable with and restructure the sentence to reflect the way you write.
- Are you over-using quotations? Take a step back and look at your paper as a whole. How much of it consists of your original words compared to direct quotations? Paraphrase or summarize information instead of using long quotations.
- Are you data dumping? The 70/30 rule is popular with our instructors. 70% or more should be your own words while 30% is the cited research (direct quotes, summaries, and paraphrases). Avoiding data dumping will improve your Turnitin score.
- Are you properly citing? You need double quotations marks around every quote and the in-text citation pointing the reader to the original source.
