Best ways to avoid plagiarism in writing – Nobody likes plagiarized content when it comes to writing. Any content that’s plagiarized is never welcomed with open arms.
But when someone plagiarizes today, it isn’t just about people liking it or disliking it.
Today with copy-and-pasting so easy, it’s crucial for content anywhere to be ‘original’. Plagiarism for any website potentially harms its business, trust, or even both. So let’s look at ways to avoid plagiarism in writing‘.
Plagiarism refers to copying content from one site and publishing it on another. This occurs most in:
- Online publishing
- Writing
- Blogging
This is harmful these days because of the web tools available on the market today. SEO also plays a role when it comes to plagiarism, but it essentially comes to trust. We’ll talk about it in a minute.
Plagiarism in Blogging
Consider you have a blog. When you’re getting many readers, you look forward to monetizing. The popular options are partnering with an ad network like Adsense or affiliate marketing.
The top ad networks like Google Adsense have simple but rigid rules for approval. One is:
- The site shouldn’t contain plagiarized content.
Say your entire blog has a single paragraph in one post plagiarized, you’re ineligible to apply. The same applies to affiliate programs.
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- The Complete Blog Writing Course!
- Ultimate Blogging Roadmap: Blog + Content Writing Pro Tips
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Note: It works both ways. Whether someone plagiarizes your content, you can still be penalized! (Read more here)
4 Ways to Avoid Plagiarism
Let’s avoid all that trouble and be on safer grounds, shall we? Here are some ways to avoid plagiarism:
1. Paraphrase using creativity
In today’s world of millions of content sites, everyone follows the technique of paraphrasing at some point.
Paraphrasing is rephrasing a source’s content and bringing it into your own words. Since everybody’s doing it, it’s difficult to stand out.
So find new ways to rephrase. But, the best solution is to add your knowledge to it as your rewrite – keeping it unique with more insights. Though it doesn’t add up much, this tiny bit makes a lot of difference.
Not only do you avoid plagiarism, but you also add value to your content. However, be careful when you do this. There are times when your rephrased content can also be termed as plagiarized. For a safer side, you can make use of citations of the content you referred to and also make use of a plagiarism checker by Grammarly.
2. Adding citation or quotes
To take parts of a source and include them in your own works, it’s best to quote the parts. The best example to do this is when mentioning a quote. I use it sometimes too.
If you’re adding quotes, here is a WriteLife article that’ll help you.
Another way to do it is to take parts from the source with citations. Along with the citation, also mention
- The source you referred to
- The date on which it was published
- Anything that can be considered as an element.
3. Use a plagiarism checker
A plagiarism checker is a tool that lets you know when your work is plagiarized.
Such an online tool scans your article and finds out if its content matches any of the other millions of sites it checks. Say the post matches a couple of lines or a single sentence, the tool shall point it out. These plagiarism tools offer a variety of options.
Some of them offer an ‘exclude’ option to eliminate a particular page on the web from being checked. This helps when you’ve published the content before and wish to publish it again. Some offer to scan a whole site for plagiarism.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of plagiarism checkers that offer this service. Even Grammarly has its own plagiarism checker with a pretty neat design.
However, this tool has its own ups and downs – be it the free or premium version. Check out my review on it.
4. Make original content!
Best way to avoid plagiarism in writing? Make your own content! There isn’t a chance of getting your work being plagiarized when you put in your own words.
But there’s a hitch to it. Most writers use their style everywhere they go. It so happens that they can actually be caught plagiarizing their own work. When you keep writing on the same topic, sometimes you tend to take up content from your previous works.
This can turn out to be as bad as plagiarizing from another source. Thus it’s best to keep improvising the way one writes.
Conclusion
That concludes on the ways to avoid plagiarism in writing. This post aims to help people in the freelance writing and blogging sector. Here are some other works of mine on writing that might interest you:
- How To Write a Great Plot Twist
- How To Write a Short Story: Step-by-Step
- Writers Work Review (Unbiased) – 2021 update
- Online Writing Tools to Enhance Writing Quality
*This post contains affiliate links where I receive a small commission at no additional cost of the products to you. Also, I only recommend products that I completely trust.
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