Grammar Check or Plagiarism Check, What Comes First?

Once the final draft of your paper is finished, there are still many important steps that need to be taken care of. Yes, the next logical step for you would be to re-read, revise, and essentially edit your paper.

While manually going through your paper is necessary, there are a few checks which can be automated by using tools as one may miss them during a manual check. To that end, there are two very important checks you need to complete before your submitting your paper.

Otherwise, you may unknowingly be submitting a paper that has errors that may result in poor grades, desk rejection, and in extreme cases, a tarnished reputation.

These two checks are grammar check and plagiarism check.

Grammar Check and Spelling Check

It is mandatory to do the most basic spelling and grammar checks using the in-built tool in your writing software like Microsoft Word. You may be extremely proficient in the English language, but we are all human and no one is above making typographical errors in their writing.

That said, one must also remember that these tools have their limitations. Also as with spell-checking, even the best grammar-checking tool is going to miss mistakes or make few errors. Grammar checking your work might be challenging, though.

Since you have written it yourself, you know exactly what the content is and how it flows—something that Harvard-based cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker calls the “curse of knowledge”—it can be difficult to read your work carefully and slowly enough to detect language errors or text that could be difficult to understand.

The best approach to combat that is to just have it read by another person. Having a second pair of eyes proofread your work can help you find language errors. If this isn’t feasible, you can slow down your reading by using a variety of techniques.

Try reading the article backward, starting with the last sentence and working your way up, reading each sentence separately. You could also read the paper out loud. Doing so will help you identify not just grammar errors but also awkward phrases.

Plagiarism Check

Plagiarism is a very serious issue and it never hurts to be certain, especially if your school allows you the opportunity to examine your work before submission. It can be helpful to spend a little to run your work through a plagiarism checker to discover any similar content that you might have overlooked or anything that might raise concerns.

While nearly no paper will have 0% matching, it’s a fantastic opportunity to check for ambiguous passages and to see if you missed any citations and quotation marks. Even if this check turns up nothing alarming, it might still help to relieve your mind and boost your confidence before you submit your paper or essay.

Order of Checks to be Performed

There is a specific order in which authors go through the different steps of preparing a manuscript. So, for the two steps mentioned above, i.e., grammar check and plagiarism check, one may choose to do it in whichever order they prefer. However, since the spelling and grammar checker is in-built in Word, it is logical to run that through the manuscript right after it is finished.

Following that, it would be advisable to run the manuscript through a different grammar checker and make enhancements where suggested. This grammar-checked manuscript can then be checked by a plagiarism detection tool.

If any sentence is flagged as highly similar to published content, make revisions to the text. If you have to make a lot of changes, then get your revised essay or manuscript checked by a grammar checker tool again to be completely safe. This way you can ensure that errors, if present, are minimized to the largest extent possible.

Plagiarism and Grammar Checker Tools

Since plagiarism and grammar checks are equally important to ensure that a manuscript is submission-ready, it would be smart to invest in an online tool that checks both in one go. Trinka’s AI Grammar Checker has a plagiarism checker powered by iThenticate, built into the same interface.

Trinka AI is an online grammar checker and language correction AI tool especially made for academic and technical writing.—it corrects 3000+ complex grammar errors.

Trinka iThenticate Plagiarism check ensures the most reliable plagiarism detection by combining the most powerful algorithms and the richest database of published material. This database also includes all open access repositories and all available internet content.

Researchers and students can use this check to easily compare their work against already-published articles from 1,700+ publishers including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Sage.

Comparison with Other Plagiarism Checkers

Given the variety of tools available, choosing the best plagiarism checker might be difficult. We examined a variety of popular plagiarism detection tools to make this process simpler for you. We compared the results of four plagiarism checkers on an example thesis document that contained significant amounts of plagiarism.

We analyzed accuracy, database size, accessibility, usability, affordability, and security of three top programs based on these six criteria. Our analysis shows that Trinka Plagiarism Checker performed better than the other tools. It offers the most trustworthy and accurate analysis and check while safeguarding your data.