Top Tips for Avoiding Plagiarism
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Posted by Alexander Stwart - Filed in Other - 87 views
Have you ever wondered about how you can avoid plagiarism in your work? Avoiding plagiarism can often seem like a major challenge today, especially since there’s so much content online. How can you avoid plagiarizing content when everything’s already online? While this is a difficult question to answer, you can consider several top tips to avoid plagiarism and ensure your writing is up to the top standard.
Why is Avoiding Plagiarism Important?
Avoiding plagiarism in your writing is massively crucial for several critical reasons. Most notably of all, though, is to prevent lawsuits. Indeed, there are often stiff penalties for plagiarism within the media industry, which is why media liability insurance is so integral for many firms. Moreover, from a website perspective, including plagiarized content on your site can leave your website getting hampered by the Google search results; this may reduce your platform’s ability to reach new audiences.
How to Avoid Plagiarism in Your Writing
So, you’re planning to write something new – but, to begin with, you’ll naturally need resources to reference. If you have experienced this, it can seem tricky to rewrite the referenced content in brand new words. Still, it shouldn’t have to be – and there are several great ways you can avoid plagiarism in your writing as a result. These include the following tips:
1. Start by reading the entire document, and then write from memory as much as possible. This step reduces the chances of accidentally copying across an entire line of text. And, if there are any points you have forgotten, feel free to go back through the reference text later to find a few pointers.
2. Make simple, handwritten notes while studying the source text. Then, write up your new content based on these notes, rather than relying on the reference exclusively. This simple change drastically reduces the chances of including plagiarism in your writing and allows you to correct any instances of plagiarism if they should accidentally pop up.
3. Make use of plagiarism checking tools such as Copyscape. These are often premium subscriptions, but they are drastically more affordable than a lawsuit for plagiarism!
4. Finally, if you are really unable to avoid plagiarism in your writing, why not use a quote instead? Though the exact protocols for using quotes may vary depending on the source and purpose, quoting on a website is far simpler than quoting on a scientific review – this can be an excellent option to consider if you can’t rewrite the work in your own words. Notably, though, you must always give fair credit to the author when quoting and ask the author’s permission first – not all authors will be happy with their work being quoted elsewhere.
