Plagiarism, Paraphrase, or Parallelism?

byessengy6903

162 followers

7 years ago

Avoid Paraphrase?

Twice my content had been flagged as "not original." As far as I know I did not copy. What is going on? This got me to thinking. Has this got to do with that other blog I wrote many years ago at blogger? It was not even a money blog. It was a family blog. I set it up to connect with famiy back home. It was before Facebook.

So, I visited it again. Truth to tell, I had forgotten about it. I check the contents. There's no connection to my recent arcticles. It was not about niches, and affiliate marketing. It was about family events. So, what's the problem?

Perhaps it has to do with how I write? I began looking into some possibilities. I did a bit of research on sentence construction and paragraph structure and some other things. I came up with four possible issues: outright copying or plagiarism, paraphrase, parallelism, and style.

To paraphrase means to restate or reword (as in restructure) a statement. An example – “many people are fixated on the idea that to innovate means to come up with a brilliant idea,” The paraphrase –“there’s more to innovation that just a brilliant idea,” or, “to a lot of people, innovation simply means a bright idea.” Lecturers resort to this when the message in the original statement is not clear, or wordy. Teachers do this all the time. This is also the most common practice of neoplagiarist or spinners, as they are called, on the internet.

Paraphrase is not the same as a direct quote. The truth is, direct quotes are acceptable provided the statement is enclosed in open and close quotation marks, and the source cited. As an example – in one of his posts John Smith stated “the chicken crossed the street because it saw seeds on the other side.” (par.4; The Limits of Reasoning; May 17, 2018.)

Paraphrase is rather risky. Poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) cited this “parallelism”, as some critics called it then, in his journals (Source: Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore: Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists.):Take a look at this:

Hood’s:

But when the morn came dim and sad,

And chill with early showers,

Her quiet eyelids closed; — she had

Another morn than ours.

Aldrich’s:

Her sufferings ended with the day,

Yet lived she at its close,

And breathed the long, long night away

In statue-like repose;

But when the sun in all its state

Illumed the eastern skies,

She passed through Glory’s morning gate,

And walked in paradise

Sticky issue

I’m not at liberty to say here which is the original, or the copy. It’s up to you to decide. You can read the full text of Poe’s arguments by googling the site. I should warn you though, it’s too long and wordy. The language appeared to me very old New Colonies, and laborious. But, the defenders of the poet who copied the original maintained it was “parallelism” and not plagiarism. Another case of semantics?

The similarities in meanings are clearly obvious. But, poetries, when they have identical themes, result in the same meanings. So, I guess the critics (or in this case the algorithms?:) ) would focus on rhymes, rhythms, and meter.

So, when we get down to content, write-ups that focus on the same themes have, clearly, the same meanings. Obviously, the algorithms that capture “duplicates” focus on something else. Sentence construction? Word usage? Paragraph structure? “All of the above?”

Style

Another issue to consider is style. If you’ve been writing content before, as I have in Blogspot (it was a family blog just to satisfy my family who wants to read back home, and that was before Facebook.) And, assuming that your contents are still out there (I copied all to files, and deleted them), chances are the algorithms would factor that in too. And, heaven forbid! If you still have them in your head and by some quirk of imagination you recall some inspiring line from one of those postings and include it in your recent postings, you could get flagged!

Outsource?

So then, how plausible is the idea of a VA? I say, content writing does not come easy. Even if you’re writing about your passion, you may still need some help. You have to navigate through all those caveats, mazes and caverns to get one good one in. So, what is the guarantee that outsourcing content writing through VA is going to work? I tried looking into Fiverr on advice from a friend, and this writer that caught my eye had these “conditions” – “100 words, delivery in 7 days -$15.” I could probably write 5 articles in seven days if I doubled my efforts. One hundred words, what kind of content is that?

My 2 cents worth? Keep on writing! Oh, yeah! Nobody said this was going be easy. As they say, “the road to riches is plagued by thorny bushes!”