The Dos and Don’ts of Writing Unique Copy: How to Avoid Paraphrasing

Advertisements, marketing, and product reviews are essential parts of all organizations. The significance of the quality content is unavoidable in this arena. Paraphrasing passages cannot be just enough for the firms. Organizations need people who expertise in creating meaningful content to satisfy the need to create unique content.

In education, too, students are required to write lengthy papers that are mostly research-based. These do not leave any scope for the researchers to develop an idea that has already been used. Original content needs to be prepared by students. Failing to do that may significantly affect their academic performance and grade.

Bloggers, content creators, and content writing agencies are growing like mushrooms every day due to the increased demand and popularity of quality content. However, the question that arises is what differentiates an impactful write-up from any write-up?

The answer is relatively simple. The purpose of writing a blog, article, and research paper are to provide relevant information. One can achieve this only when the writers themselves have thorough knowledge about the topic at hand.

Thus, the writers, bloggers, and researchers have the massive responsibility of doing in-depth study and delivering genuine information in the best way possible. It is their passion that compels them to work hard, and it reflects in the result produced.

What Leads to Plagiarizing When Creating Content?

• Creating copy requires creative exploration by the writers. The process includes brainstorming for novel ideas, creating several drafts, filtration to check for errors, and finally, the ideal presentation. Lack of creative ideas often leads writers to indulge in plagiarism, using others’ content without their consent.
• Often students choose or are given topics that are beyond their understanding. For writers, too, it might happen when they find it challenging to complete the matter at hand, which seemed interesting initially. They may start it with but struggle to finish the work at hand, thus indulging in plagiarism.
• Creativity knows no boundary. If the writers are given strict deadlines or specific and strict instructions about the writing, they may copy content. 
• Writers often summarize or paraphrase other writers’ content as these are usually not considered to be plagiarism. However, just like quoting views, opinions, phrases, and using ideas, paraphrasing is also considered content theft.

What Is Paraphrasing?

The process of paraphrasing consists of summarizing a paragraph keeping the idea of the paragraph intact. It provides an overview of the entire written piece, just like a catchy headline. It saves readers from the trouble of going through a whole article or blog. Instead, with the help of aparaphrase generator, they can grasp the writer’s central idea.

The Dos and Don’ts of Writing Unique Copy

• Avoid Plagiarism While Paraphrasing:

People often wonder why summarizing and paraphrasing are considered to be plagiarism? The problem lies in the fact that most content creators take the help of paraphrase software to prepare the summary of a paper, blog, article, and more. In such cases, the author’s original words remain unchanged, making the latter a duplicate content.

It is not unnatural for people to be inspired by each other. So as an alternative to blind copying, every word writers may reframe their sentences while paraphrasing to save themselves from plagiarism accusations. Replace the author’s words with one’s own to create something that will be a unique blend of both.

• Cross-Checking Content:

Plagiarism can be both intentional and accidental. Writers may come up with a similar idea or repeat words of another writer unintentionally in their paper or write-up; this results in unintentional plagiarism.

The content creators should proofread their writing before submission to avoid such accidental plagiarism. At least once, they may seek others’ assistance in manually reading their write-ups to reduce plagiarism risk.

• Citation:

Citing sources is an integral part of creating content. The author of any printed medium or online content deserves credit for their creation. People taking the help of those resources must give due recognition and acknowledge the original creators’ effort.

A sentence checker can even identify copied sentences while comparing two documents. So to avoid unnecessary trouble, it is better to source the sites used by the writers.

What is worthy in this regard is that the writer has to know two things: the art of citation and what sources to cite. Printed media such as lines, quotes from books, paper, magazines, and other such things, along with digital media such as images, blogs, articles, and more, must receive an appropriate citation.

Proverbs and famous sayings do not require citation. However, generally, these are written within inverted commas. In short, the writers must not pass anything as their own, which does not originally belong to them.

• There is No Short-Cut:

People say ‘there is no short-cut to successes,’ and the saying is just apt for the online paraphrasing tools. The paraphrasing tools online are no doubt time-saving, but the mere imitation of other authors’ write-up may put the content creators in trouble. A duplicate content destroys the reputation and goodwill of the writer. It can seriously affect the academic grades of a student.

To protect the interest of the writers’ organizations and educational publishers now use copyright over their content to restrict unwanted access over their content and limit access and usage. Paraphrasing such copyrighted content may lead the offender to face legal charges, including monetary loss and also face loss.

A lot goes into creating a piece of content including an excess of time and effort. Beginners must first familiarize themselves with the dos and don’ts of writing before they think of proceeding further in this field.

Students, too, must seek their teachers or other experts’ guidance for better insight and knowledge about how to present papers. Moreover, they should have an in-depth understanding of what is paraphrasing. It will help them as they will not end up plagiarizing a text.