Eight Practical Ways to Reduce Similarity in Your Thesis

First, a warning: tricks like substituting look-alike characters, hiding white text, or running your work through an automatic paraphrasing tool do not work, and if discovered they count as deliberate misconduct — far more serious than accidental plagiarism.

These eight are the real ones.

1. Read, close the file, then write

The biggest cause of high similarity is writing with the source open on screen. Even with good intentions, the sentence structure stays in your head.

Read the source, close it, wait a few minutes, then write what you understood. Go back afterwards to check you have not misrepresented anything.

2. Express the idea, not the sentence

Proper paraphrasing means restating the source's idea in your own structure of thought. Swapping individual words leaves the sentence architecture intact, and Turnitin sees architecture too.

3. Quote directly only where it matters

A direct quotation earns its place when the exact words matter: a key definition, a historically significant statement, or a passage you are going to analyse. Everywhere else, summarise.

4. Fix the report settings first

Before you panic, check whether the bibliography and quotations were excluded from the calculation. Very often a frightening percentage is simply the reference list being counted.

5. Make your methods section specific

Methods always show the highest similarity because everyone describes the same standard procedure. The fix is to add the specifics of your own study: exact sample sizes, environmental conditions, and any modifications you made to the protocol.

6. Write an analytical literature review

A review that merely lists ("Smith said... Jones said...") scores high on similarity and reads poorly. Instead, compare the studies, show where they disagree, and say where your own work sits on that map.

7. Rebuild tables and figures yourself

If you take data from a source, rebuild the table yourself and cite the source. Copying a table raises copyright questions as well as adding to your similarity.

8. Check early, not the night before

This is the most important one. Check a week before submission and you have time to rewrite problem sections properly. Discover a 35% score the night before and there is nothing you can do.

Better still: check chapter by chapter. Finish a chapter, check it, fix it, move on. Then nothing surprises you at the end.

Get both reports in minutes. Your document is never stored in the Turnitin repository, so you can re-check as many times as you need while you revise.