If you’re a content writer you must have to know plagiarism. Writing is a challenge in itself, you must do tight research and present your ideas, values and thoughts in it. But you must also keep your writing safe from falling into plagiarism. Confused? Yes, you’re writing can be prone to plagiarism.
So what is this plagiarism? It is intentional or unintentional usage of ideas or words of other writers. Even using words or ideas from your previous work is also considered plagiarism. This can be considered as an intellectual offence. Plagiarism can cause many negative consequences like the loss of credibility, paper retractions etc.
With the rise in technology and the power of the internet has created access to more information to people making easy to copy and paste it under their name. This digital age is also affecting the writers. With all this going around writers are facing more challenges in completing the work and getting credibility.
There are 4 common types of plagiarisms i.e., Direct Plagiarism, self-plagiarism, Mosaic Plagiarism, Accidental Plagiarism. To avoid all these types of plagiarism you can use Plagiarism checker: free online tools. These tools are making it easy for users to understand and detect plagiarised content.
So the million dollar question here is what are the other ways to protect your content from plagiarism? Even if it’s accidental, what can we do to avoid it? Here are a few tips to avoid plagiarism.
Context
When you’re researching the topic you will be writing. Always make sure to understand the context of the site your referring. Don’t just copy paste the content directly from the site. This may raise plagiarism issues. Take your time with research and don’t rush things. In a hurry, there are more chances of you committing mistakes. Take your time and avoid making unnecessary mistakes.
Sources & Quotes
Cite the sources or reference sites you’re referring for content. This will possibly the most effective way to avoid plagiarism. If it’s not done properly it will not be effective. So don’t forget to comply with all the conditions for citing the source. You can even keep that mentioned the content in the quote, it automatically helps google to understand that this piece of content is already somewhere on the internet.
So to avoid plagiarism you can follow either of the methods. To be prudent you can even search for your source’s source. So that you can understand where did they draw their information from.
Detailed Outline
Your article should not be a product of other ideas and thoughts. As part of the research, you can refer to other materials but you cannot present them as yours. Sometimes plagiarism can be detected accidentally also, you know your content can be similar to others as you cannot search through the internet completely.
So to avoid such possibilities all you can do is outline your topic ideas, note which ideas are your and which ideas are from references this way you when citing the source you will not make mistakes. You can even colour code them so that you won’t have any last minute mishaps.
Plagiarism Checkers
To make your worries ease now there are tools available that can assist you in checking plagiarism. As you cannot surf all the articles relating to your topic on the internet and search for plagiarism these tools will do that for you. Some are paid tools whereas others are free. Tools like Copyscape, Grammarly etc are making it easy for users to check for plagiarism.
If you find any relevant content you can change it as now you will know where exactly are the problem is. All you have to do submit your text or document and check. It will show compared text if there are any. It does line to line verification to produce accurate results. If you find any compared text you can just change it.
Paraphrase
As you found all the relevant and required information for writing your topic, you can rephrase it into your own words without deteriorating its initial meaning. For that to happen you must understand your topic better. Once you have a better understanding nothing can stop you from rephrasing it. You can even replace on word with another or use synonyms of that particular word.
Reference page and Discussion
You can add a reference page right at the end of your article where you can site all the reference sites you have taken into consideration while working on this article. Keep a list from the start of your article so that you wouldn’t forget any references that needed to be included later if you’re planning to do it after finishing your article then you may later realise that it is not a good idea as you will forget at least one of them. You have little group discussions with your team before writing your topic, that way you can actually have more original ideas and it helps you with plagiarism also.
