Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Paraphrase Tools May Not Be Detected by Anti-Plagiarism Programs

Anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin.com cannot necessarily detect paraphrase tools that automatically generate alternative text for passages that users submit online ("Tools That May Discourage Quality Writing," Inside Higher Education, March 3, 2017). However, in testing some of these paraphrase tools, the quality of their wording is frequently nonsensical or too close to the original text to be of any use in a college paper.

Discussion Questions:
  1. Do you find paraphrasing from sources challenging? Why or why not?
  2. Would you use a paraphrase generator even if the quality of their output is poor? Why or why not?
  3. What's the best way you have found to paraphrase text?