: Re: Questioning Plagiarism Rules Who we are, where we came from and how we came to be what we are This sentence was flagged as plagiarized by Grammarly. So I looked up the cite that Grammarly

@Courtney562

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It's fine to question plagiarism rules (though it might not get you anywhere), but these rules will be set by the people to whom you're making the submission - an academic body, a publisher or, in the ultimate case, the law courts in your home nation or the nation of publication (if these are different).

Plagiarism will also have to refer to a specific original source. The phrase "Who we are, where we came from and how we came to be what we are." is unlikely to be regarded as plagiarism by any official body as it's likely to have occurred in many places - to the extent that it could be regarded as in common use.

(The exception to this is if you knowingly lifted the phrase from a specific text, but that's a lot more difficult to prove and I can't see it happening with that particular phrase - unless it appears in something you're known or can be assumed to have read, for example a course text book appearing in an thesis without citation.)

While online grammar checking resources offer some interesting tools, they are not the arbiters of what is and isn't plagiarism. The "isn't" is as relevant as the "is" here - if I was to write that plagiarism can't be detected by algorithms, many of the simpler resources would be unable to tell that I lifted the idea straight out of Mark's answer.

"Grammarly" is fine for what it is, but it's also worth bearing in mind what it isn't.

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