Many of us have used it for english papers, history papers, term papers or even persuasive papers. Turnitin.com has been one of the most effective plagiarism detecting tools that teachers have been using for years, and its popularity continues to grow. It’s a website that most high school students are familiar with, along with anyone associated with Teenink.com, considering that it states boldly that everything submitted will also be checked on turnitin.com. It’s a database that contains billions of different pieces of writing including; Internet sources, books, newspapers, and, of course, student papers.

It goes without saying that the longer this site stays around the larger it’s going to get. New books, papers and hundreds of other sources are being added almost daily to this database. Let’s be real though, there's only so many different ways you can write a sentence. There’s only so many ways a high school student can analyze the humor that’s present within "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", or only so many ways someone can explain the use of color imagery Scott Fitzgerald uses in his novel, "The Great Gatsby". There are only so many different ways you can write about things before people begin to copy each other inadvertently.

Turnitin.com is a useful tool, there’s no doubt about it, but where do we draw the line on plagiarism? A friend of mine was once forced to re-write a paper because his thesis statement and a few of his topic sentences were too similar to those of a person who had graduated a number of years ago. The paper was his own thoughts, and came from his own mind, and it was his own fingers rapping against the keyboard that created each and every sentence. Not only that, but he had no affiliation to this grad what so ever, which isn’t surprising considering how long ago he graduated. Is it plagiarism if every thought and every sentence and every word written in a paper comes from a person’s own ideas? Is it plagiarism if it’s inadvertent?

The copy and paste days from informational Internet sites are over, and have been over, for quite some time. The topics teachers are asking us to write about are becoming more difficult and more specific, like by having to include critical evidence and the use of different informational documents to try and support our ascertains. With that said, I believe that there’s only a matter of time before plagiarism becomes more frequent throughout high school papers, merely because of the fact there’s only so many ways you can create a sentence . . . or a paragraph . . . or even an entire term paper.

Turnitin.com is a fantastic plagiarism tool for teachers, but I can’t help but wonder how long it can be effective.