Fortunately, there is a tool that can help. For students, plagiarism often means a failing grade, academic probation, or worse. Unintentional plagiarism of even a sentence or two can have serious consequences. Is it still plagiarism if you’re using less than a paragraph? Using someone else’s text without attribution is plagiarism, whether you meant to do it or not. But now they’re an important part of your paper. You didn’t bother with a citation at the time because you weren’t planning to keep them.
Did you read it somewhere while you were researching the topic? If you did, does that count as plagiarism? Now that you’re looking at it, there are a couple of other lines that you know you borrowed from somewhere. You’re working on a paper and you’ve just written a line that seems kind of familiar.
