Here’s How You Can Prevent Plagiarism in Short Articles

Information is valuable in this digital world, and creating good content within a short time is important today. Short articles are one way of sharing information on any topic quickly. They are found all over the Internet and help the readers to glean information, and then, go to the relevant website for more details. A short article may relate to your opinion about a topic, research, news, analysis on something and a comparative study.

Writing short articles present challenges in collecting ideas from the Internet and adding pertinent information. If you fail to do it appropriately, it may cause plagiarism. This page explains ways to avoid plagiarism while writing short articles.

What Are the Perks of Writing Short Articles?

• With a short article, you can get your message across in an interesting and fun way.
• For some topics of interest and audience, short articles are better, for they give you a lot of readers, and can be read quickly. For instance, articles on social issues like healthcare, immigration stress, childhood obesity, etc., attract all types of readers.
• You can convey the message or idea through short articles if they are written well.
• Writing them needs skills as you need to accommodate valuable information or argument in a short interesting package for the readers.
• Short articles are the best way to lead your readers to a journal or long article on your website.

 How to Avoid Plagiarism in Short Articles?

Plagiarism is intellectual property infringement and is considered unethical in education and business. Copying others’ work can lead to serious consequences. Here are some ways to prevent plagiarism in short articles.

1. Effective Paraphrasing

When you write articles, you need to research and take ideas from other sources. Copying the text verbatim is unfair and it results in plagiarism. Paraphrase or restate the words in your own words and phrases. However, effective paraphrasing requires you to follow some strategies such as:

• Read the original text and understand the complete meaning of it, as well as the author’s intention behind writing it.
• Refer a good dictionary for words you do not know or their meaning.
• Write the author’s ideas in your own words, without going back and reading the text again.
• Personalize it by adding your own ideas or opinion.
• Compare your writing with the original ideas.
• Provide a citation, which includes the title of the content, page number and author’s name and year.

• Cite the Sources

When you refer a source and use ideas from it, you need to give a footnote citation to help identify that the idea used is not yours. Not providing in-text citation will lead to plagiarism detection. The citation must match the full reference in the bibliography given at the end. The way you cite the source depends on the style guide you follow. You may follow MLA (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association) or Chicago Manual style.

However, you need not cite common knowledge or facts. Any content you use from your own paper should be cited, or else it will result in self-plagiarism.

• Use Quotations

When you quote, you copy a text or sentence word-for-word. The text you use should be within quotation marks and appropriately attributed to the original source.

• Use an Online Plagiarism Checker

Though there are several plagiarism detection tools online, it is essential and advisable to use a fast and accurate one with unique features. An advanced plagiarism tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to identify similar and paraphrased sentences or text. It is known for multi-layered and deep search capabilities, where it compares your article with documents or pages from trillions of online sources.

The use of AI helps in detecting any cheating technique like hiding or replacing characters in the text to disguise plagiarism. The comprehensive plagiarism report helps you find the areas identified for similarity and improve them.

Guide to Successful Article Writing

When it comes to writing short articles, you need to consider the following points.

• Have a list of ideas that interest you: Writing is not easy if you do not know what to write. This asks for having a list of ideas to write potential reviews, analysis, or stories. Whenever you come across an idea or topic, you need to write it down to use it later.
• Focus on what you write: When writing short articles, you may go off at a tangent, and not focus on the topic. If you want to get your message across, you should stay on the subject.
• Do enough research: You can win your readers’ trust if you have valuable information from credible sources after conducting enough research.
• Follow the format: There are good article writing formats that you can follow to give a proper structure to your short articles. Some proven article writing templates can help you with the outline and structure. If you are a beginner, you can get over writer’s block and start writing thus, improving your writing style.

Writing short articles, without any plagiarism and publishing them help you recognized as a writer. If you need a start, you can use the article writing templates to write short articles in a few minutes, and develop your writing skills.