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I think there's a difference between reasonably similar in content and style. You can come up with the same points, but your own personal style affects word choice. Plagiarism is not about similarity -- it's about the actual theft of words. In a past case, one of the newspapers printed an extensive comparison of sentences within the two works. The sentences were similar is style and wording, even though it was two different authors. I could even see that there was clear intent in the examples -- the plagiarist had gone back in and changed some words to make it look different, or rearranged the sentence. In that case, things like descriptions were what got him, because description shows an author's style.
I have caught a plagiarist myself. It was high school, and a student copied an old Reader's Digest story for her homework. She had to read out loud, and it was how familiar the style sounded that flagged it for me. She'd changed up a few things, like the gender of the main character and the name -- but the style was unmistakable. If a lot of other writers were picking up on similarity, it would have been the style, not the content. ~~~~~~Signature's Off~~~~~~
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