Prevent Plagiarism
Nowadays it is really easy to get your writing published, especially if you have your own blog or website. There are also plenty of opportunities to get your writing published through different sources such as magazines, newspapers, and online magazines. The only problem with this is that if you have a lot of writing out there, your work is more susceptible to getting plagiarized. Plagiarism is where someone takes your work and passes it off as his or her own work. This is prohibited and a very upsetting thing to happen. There are a lot of people out there who want to make money off of work they didn’t do and didn’t pay to have done. This is a real problem. However, there are ways that you can prevent plagiarism so that this doesn’t happen to you.
The first thing you can do to prevent plagiarism is to make sure that you know exactly where all of your work is. Keep track of everything you write, even things that you have stored on your computer. This includes journal entries, poems, stories, articles, etc. Also keep track of where you sent your work for possible publication and also which publications have accepted your work. The ore organized you are, the easier it will be to keep track of things so you can be able to prevent plagiarism.
The next step is to search online to see if other people are using your words as their own. One trick that people use is to imbed a certain, unique word or phrase in each of your posts. This works best if it is a word that only you know and that you’ve made up. It has to be completely unique. Then every now and then, you can search on that particular word or phrase to keep track of where your work is. If it appears on websites or blogs that you are in no way affiliated with, chances are that someone took your stuff.
Another thing you can do is report it when you notice that someone took the work of another person. Sometimes it happens that you encounter this even if it has nothing to do with you or your words. Either way, you need to contact the webmaster and inform them that the site is plagiarized and that you need them to take down the words that aren’t theirs.
