We ran Melania Trump's speech through a plagiarism checker
College students, take note: if you plagiarize, people will notice.
Melania Trump spoke during the Republican National Convention on Monday night, leaving some viewers with a sense of déjà vu.
Following a tweet from journalist Jarrett Hill, many called out Trump on blatantly plagiarizing Michelle Obama's 2008 speech from the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
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Looking at the speeches side by side, they are shockingly similar.
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The Washingtonian ran the transcripts of the suspicious paragraphs from Trump's speech through a comparison plagiarism checker, Small SEO Tools. The results, perhaps predictably, showed that nearly half of the speech was taken directly from Obama's speech.
"The first half of the excerpt came in at 46 percent non-unique, while the next few sentences registered at 44 percent non-unique," wrote The Washingtonian.
Mashable also ran the transcripts through the checker, and came up with similar results. The first excerpt, however, came up as 47 percent non-unique.
According to The Washingtonian, citing the plagiarism checker TurnItIn.com, "the likelihood that a 16-word match is ‘just a coincidence’ is less than 1 in a trillion. Melania Trump’s longest match? 23 words."
This particular type of plagiarism is known as "clone plagiarism," in which the copier lifts words and phrases verbatim from another source. College professors agree that this kind of copying is not acceptable.
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies and co-chairwoman of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, told USA Today, "if I were reading a student paper and two paragraphs were lifted almost verbatim, I would turn the student into the dean and then he or she would decide the student's fate in terms of the college."
Still, Team Trump is denying all accusations about the speech, citing everything from My Little Pony to directly blaming Hillary Clinton for the backlash.
Still, let's hope Team Trump doesn't turn in any college papers.
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Topics Melania Trump Politics
Andrea Romano -- comedy writer, craft enthusiast, lady -- was a Watercooler Reporter. She worked as an intern at Mashable beginning in January 2014. Andrea recently completed her Masters degree in Media Studies and Film from The New School and writes sketch comedy at Upright Citizens Brigade and The People's Improv Theatre. She once watched three Paul Rudd movies in a row on a bicoastal flight and didn't realize it until she landed. She does things like that a lot. Twitter: @theandrearomano
