Avoiding unintentional Plagiarism

Plagiarism is every professional content writer’s most dreaded word. Only a few of the unscrupulous kind like to progress as a writer by intentionally plagiarizing other’s work. For the rest of us, it’s a much feared thing. I don’t know about others, but I always try to check that I do not, even unintentionally, plagiarize from somebody else’s work. My company Indusnet Technologies has a strict rule in this regard. If a writer does it for the first time (whether intentionally or unintentionally) he or she is duly warned. If the offence is repeated more than once, he or she may be terminated! The rule is more or less same for any good company from this field. So, if you are working or planning to work in this field, here are some tips on how to avoid unintentional plagiarism.

• First of all, research thoroughly about the subject you are going to write on. From my personal experience, I have seen that if I consult very few materials, my writing, unintentionally starts sounding like the material I consulted. So to avoid it, read quite a many articles and then assimilate the materials in your head. Your write-up will have elements of many articles, but will be written in your own words. They will be a reflection of your thought after reading the subject. In fact, as I read somewhere, “good content writing is a mixture of 90% research time and 10% of actual writing time”!
• If the research material is too scanty, as it happens many times, try to write in a different format altogether when you write your article.
• Suppose your article has to have a list of things, which are identical to the main source. Here, changing the list pattern is one way to avoid making yours look like a plagiarized version.
• If you have to write a phrase or a data in the same way as in the source material, put in double quotes and if possible, give the link or the author’s name from where you quoted. Saying “author so-and-so said that” and then quoting the line or data will also help you to avoid plagiarism. Giving reference to the source is a surefire way to avoid being labeled as plagiarizer.
• To make sure you know where you got your information from, you can either put the links at the end of the article or record them in a separate file.

Hope these pointers help you. These are my personal experiences and I look forward to others from my field to give extra inputs to this very important subject. So, do leave a comment!