Accidental plagiarism is a writer’s worst nightmare. He or she submits a piece of content to a client, then learns that portions of it appear elsewhere online. It happens more often than you might think, but you can avoid it in your freelance writing career with these tips.

Take Notes Longhand

When you’re researching information for an article, copying and pasting resources from the Internet into a word processing program can easily contribute to accidental plagiarism. You won’t remember which notes you copied and which you wrote in your own personal voice. To avoid this, take notes by hand. Any time you take down information from a source, reword it for your notes. That way, you can’t accidentally use someone else’s work as your own.

Cite Your Sources

Plagiarism isn’t just copying another writer’s words verbatim. You can commit accidental plagiarism if you take someone else’s ideas and arrange them similarly for your own purposes. It’s a common way to irritate other writers and to trip plagiarism flags.

Protecting yourself is as easy as learning to cite your sources. If you glean information from someone else, let your reader know who wrote it and where it originated. You can use internal citations (such as linking to the source or making parenthetical citations) or you can include footnotes and list your sources at the end of the piece.

Put Quotation Marks Around Direct Quotes

Maybe another writer made a statement that you don’t think you can reword properly. That’s okay. Just copy the quote (keep it to a sentence or two), put it in quotation marks, and cite the source. It’s the easiest way to give credit to other writers and to avoid accidental plagiarism.

Keep the Work In-House

Some freelance writers outsource their extra work to other scribes. While this might boost your income, make sure you vet those writers carefully. If they plagiarize their work, it’s your reputation on the line. Even though you weren’t complicit in the crime, you’ll lose a client and perhaps even more.

Try to do as much of your own work as possible. If you have to outsource or hire other writers, screen their work carefully using the tools described below.

Scan for Plagiarism

As a last line of defense against accidental plagiarism, use a free or premium plagiarism tool to scan your content for duplication. These software programs compare your work against the billions of words that exist on the Internet. When they find a match, they alert you to the problem and show you the original source.

You might get false positives, but you can vet each result manually to determine whether or not it is valid. If your clients use these types of tools, try to use the same or similar programs so you’ll get identical results.

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