Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A How likely is the "five consecutive word rule" to detect "random," as opposed to intentional plagiarism?

I'm completely sure picks like "as he walked up to", "he screwed his eyebrows and" or "as far as I know" will happen notoriously but they don't constitute plagiarism because they are very common ex...

posted 11y ago by SF.‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:48:08Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/7575
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar SF.‭ · 2019-12-08T02:48:08Z (almost 5 years ago)
I'm completely sure picks like "as he walked up to", "he screwed his eyebrows and" or "as far as I know" will happen notoriously but they don't constitute plagiarism because they are very common expressions.

Don't count conjunctions, pronouns, particles and prepositions in the "five word" count - you'll start getting correct matches, and they will be exceptionally rare. Include these "generic words" and you'll get a ton of false positives.

(my experience is with writing variations of "dissociated press" program: find a sequence of words repeating within the same text and cut the text there, continuing from the found match, so that it reads smoothly as a sentence but makes for nonsensical text, a run-on story pieced together from random pieces of a different story in a grammatically correct manner. Finding a repeating sequence of three words within a 130k words document was nearly impossible.)

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2013-04-05T08:53:19Z (over 11 years ago)
Original score: 1