5 Ways To Keep Your Writing Safe

In this post, our guest blogger looks at five ways to keep your writing safe.

Guest Post

Prevent Plagiarism With Ease

I once spent weeks writing a comprehensive article, doing my best work, and I was happy when my editor published it soon after I submitted it.

Yesterday, I cried in despair when I saw my article on another site, credited to another author. Can you believe it? I decided to write this article on how to identify your content thief and how to avoid having your work plagiarised.

5 Ways To Keep Your Writing Safe

Below are five precautions that should help you out: 

1. Identify Content Scrapers

The first and the best way to check out whether any other sources post your article is Google. If you type in the title of your article, you may not see any results. What to do instead? Copy some extracts from your work and then search the results. Google Alerts helps to monitor your
content after you create and set up an alert with specific words. The best way to check whether your article is plagiarised is to insert some sentences from the middle part of your work, as the initial part and the ending are usually paraphrased.

It has become much easier to detect plagiarised content with a plagiarism checker such as Unplag. It scans your piece of work against the
Internet. This checker will not only highlight similarities, but provides links to sources from which the content might have been stolen.

2. Be Unique

The best way to avoid other people claiming your work as their own is to be as original as possible. Let your unique thoughts become words. Try your hardest to develop your own writing style. This way you will definitely stand out in an overcrowded space. You must guard against just laying out the facts, because similar facts, thoughts and ideas may be found everywhere. This can make your content too easy to copy. A unique style discourages cheaters. Consider downloading a right click and content select disabler. Nobody can copy the content if you have this.

3. The Text Length

The longer, the better. To keep content thieves from scraping your writing, fill it with details, facts, ideas, or explanations. It will take too much time to paraphrase the text, so they are likely to leave it unchanged. Once they copy it and post it elsewhere on the internet, you will find the wrongdoer in a matter of seconds. To copy a new post or article and claim it as their own, thieves tend to search for concise and precise texts, rather than longer ones.

4. When Your Work Is Plagiarised

If you discover your article has been plagiarised, contact the offending site and politely ask them to remove your content. If you do not get any response, go to DMCA.com. They can help you compose takedown notices to remove your content. (Check posts against copyright-checkers like Copyscape or Writer.com)

5. Be Authentic

If you like someone else’s idea, do not steal it. Instead, paraphrase it, or, if it is someone’s point of view, you need to use a quotation. The most important thing that you need is to be knowledgeable about the topic of your writing. You should reference all sources from which you take information. Resources such as Google Books can help you find various citations. It is every writer’s responsibility and duty to follow the rules of proper quotes, citations, references, and paraphrasing.

To Wrap It Up

It is wonderful when you are a talented writer and you create unique and original texts that attract other people’s attention, but it is unpleasant to find out that your precious work has been stolen. Thanks to rapid technological development, it has become easy to detect plagiarism and to have stolen content removed.