As more and more people transition into the digital world and upload or create new content in the various nooks and crannies of the Interwebz, a common occurrence is for lines to cross. Somewhere along the way someone is going to say something that sounds exactly like what someone else said over there. Now, while blatant copying is plagiarism, and is one of the biggest mistakes a writer can ever make, there is a difference between blatant copying of someone else’s work and not giving credit where credit is due, and simply writing something that sounds exactly like what someone else wrote.

So how do you combat the issue?

The beauty of the technological age is that there are a great many resources that we writers can use to help ensure that our work is not only of the highest calibre, but also ensure that we aren’t copying anyone else’s work. Personally, I use Article Checker and Dupli Checker.

How do they work? It’s fairly simple, really. You take the content you have written, and you plug it into their search box and choose the search engine you want it to use. I always use Google, because Google is the most trusted search engine available on the market currently. The programs then break your content down into sentences, and check those sentences against content already published on the Internet. If anything shows up as too similar, or duplicated, it will flag it and tell you which portions of the article are potential threats.

Every time I write an article for a client I check it against both of these checkers to make sure that I’m not too close to someone else. No one wants to have a flag against their record, and this is one of the best ways to make sure you aren’t copying someone else’s content, even accidentally.

What steps do you take to make sure your content is 100% original?