How to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism

Intro: Even the greatest writers are not immune to plagiarizing someone else’s material. Even if we are not aware of plagiarizing someone’s original piece of work, it still happens. By doing research and reading others articles, we instinctively recall specific sentences and wording. Follow these steps to avoid accidental plagiarism.

Step 1: Understand that when reading a book or article, you often recall and remember specific wording. This can lead to accidental plagiarism and can actually make your article worse if you are knowledgeable on the subject to begin with.

Step 2: If you are an expert on a subject or just know a lot about a specific topic, you should not read others articles. If you are an expert of dieting, then you should not read diet articles before writing your diet article. Reading another article will leave an impression of specific wording in your head whether or not you realize it. You may be curious to read other articles about dieting because there is a lot out there but refrain from doing so.

Step 3: If you are unfamiliar with a topic and want to write about it then you should read as many articles as you can on that topic before writing about it. Reading only one or two articles before writing your own article on the same topic will lead to accidental plagiarism of some parts of those two articles. Reading a ton of articles will help reduce the chance that you will plagiarize major parts of any one of the articles you read.

Step 4: After you do a ton of research on a new topic, you should not immediately write an article on the same topic. Specific wording comes from your short term memory, not your long term memory. If you sleep on it and then come back the next day to write a couple of articles on the topic, it is less likely you will accidentally plagiarize someone else’s original piece of work.

Step 5: Don’t leave the other persons article up on your screen when you are typing your article. Make sure you read the other articles from beginning to end and then close them out to focus on writing it in your own words and with your own style.

Tips: Accidental plagiarism isn’t the end of the world but you should still try very hard not to plagiarize anything whether it’s intentional or accidental.

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