Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me, I am absolutely delightful and I appreciate your concern.
Today, a point of concern for anybody who hires people to do any writing for them.
A lot of you have websites or services where you hire writers and authors to provide content
for you and the one thing that you really have to be careful of is that the work that’s
being submitted to you by your contractors is 100% original because it would be devastatingly
embarrassing to be accused of plagiarism online by posting something coming from an author
who you hired that you thought was clean and clear and indeed was just paraphrasing or
ripping off completely someone else’s work.
A) It’s a waste of your money; B)
It’s wrong; C) It would be hideously embarrassing.
So today, some tips on making sure that your copy is your own.
Before we dive into the world of plagiarism, a quick thank you to all of our Patreon sponsors.
DottoTech is supported by the community which views us and subscribes to us through Patreon
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and see if it’s something that you would consider contributing to.
Now let us talk about the world of plagiarism.
Of course, it is a terror for university students and anybody writing papers to be accused of
plagiarism.
It is one of the despicable acts, I suppose, of academia but it’s not only distasteful
in the world of academics; it’s also tremendously distasteful in the online world.
If you are a content publisher, chances are that you might be augmenting your content
online by hiring freelancers, using freelance services like Elance or oDesk or a variety
of different places.
Here you need to protect yourself to make sure that the copy and the content that you
are posting on your site is original content, is what you’re paying for.
There are a couple of ways that you can do that.
One popular way is using a service called Copyscape.
Now for five cents a search, Copyscape will go through and they will make sure that your
content is clean.
Now the cool thing about Copyscape is it can plug right into your WordPress site as an
API.
It can actually plug in and it can automatically index all of your different posts and all
of your content and make sure there’s no plagiarism there.
Additionally, what Copyscape will do for you is it will go out and it will monitor the
net.
If it sees any of your copyright content being published somewhere else, it will give you
a report back to you, telling you that you might be the victim of somebody using your
content.
So it really protects you in those areas.
It’s really for heavier content publishers, working both sides of the fence.
Personally, I use a tool called Grammerly which I’ve talked about a little bit in
the past.
I use Grammerly because I have terrible grammar and spelling when I type.
Anybody who’s viewed my website finds typos.
If you subscribe to my email, you’ll find that I have the odd typo and I would have
a lot more typos with my correspondence were I not using Grammerly.
Now to be fair I should and maybe I will soon be at the point where I can actually hire
a proper copyeditor who goes through all of my public correspondence and public documentation
and make sure that it is clear, concise and without error but until I can afford that,
this tool is the one that I use because it’s online, it’s fast and it really works well
for me.
But Grammerly does more than just check my grammar.
Grammerly will also check and look for any issues of plagiarism.
Let me show you how that might work.
I’m going to jump over to my buddy, Mike Vardy’s site.
I’m just going to copy one of his posts at the Productivityist.
If you don’t subscribe or you haven’t visited Mike’s site, he does a great job
of describing all things productivity-related and he is one of my go-to sources so I hope
he doesn’t mind me using his copy right now for a guinea pig for this particular little
experiment.
So I’ve just copied that blog post from his page and what I’m going to do is I’m
going to create a new page or a new document in Grammerly.
Now when I open Grammerly, one of the tools that I have down here is Plagiarism.
I can turn off and turn on the plagiarism checker.
Now what will happen is it will take a little bit longer to process but as well as going
through and checking for grammar—and I apologize, Mike, if you’re watching because it might
find some issues with your grammar and I know, as Mike is a very good editor, that all of
these things that Grammerly is catching, he probably feels very comfortable with the grammar
and so I’m not going to make any comment at all about his overuse of passive voice.
Sorry, Mike—but here is the key.
Look here at the very bottom – 100% unoriginal.
You see everything is underlined in it so if I click anywhere in the document, it tells
me right away that it has found that 100% of the document
is copied from this blog.
Isn’t that awesome?
It caught the plagiarism right at the source.
Now if you are a student and you are citing sources from the web, you might legitimately
be including unoriginal copy in your academic paper.
In that case, look at what this does.
It actually gives you proper citation for MLA, APA and Chicago citation methods so that
you can make sure that you properly city your source if you just happen to have a small
little snippet of content that you are indeed copying from the web.
Copying 100% of the document is not cool.
So Grammerly will allow you not only to check your grammar but it will also go through and
check to make sure that you aren’t plagiarizing.
Copyscape, Grammerly, they both do the same job.
Copyscape will also check your content and make sure that nobody else is using it.
But Grammerly also does this.
Look at this.
They also allow you now, with an upgraded service, to send a document to a real proofreader
so you’d have a real human being with real eyeballs on it and not just their automated
process.
So they’re raising the bar again for proofreading and making it that much more effective.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed this video today to be useful.
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I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!