How to Keep Your Work Original and Unique as a Professional Writer

by Maya Claire Published on September 2, 2023

Writing a unique piece of content is the fundamental quality of a writer. It becomes a must if you are a professional writer. It doesn’t matter what you write about, people (and the Internet) are going to demand unique and quality content.

That’s exactly what we are going to help you with.

In this article, we will provide you with deep insights and tactics that, when applied correctly, will help you deliver unique and awe-inspiring results in your writing.

So, let’s just start.

Why Unique and Original Work Matters in Professional Writing?

Here’s an easy answer for this: creating unique and original work is important because…

People do not want to reread something they’ve already read somewhere else
It showcases your skills

It gets your content ranked in the search engine results
It keeps you out of legal troubles

…and above all, it is the ethical thing to do. As a professional writer, copying someone else’s published material and using it as your own, or committing plagiarism, in other words, is a highly unethical thing to do.

But what plagiarism actually is? It is a term that explains the act of copying someone’s published content and using it in your own name without providing proper credit.

Plagiarism is bad for the authenticity of your work. When you post something stolen online, your readers aren’t going to appreciate you much.

Even if you somehow manage to trick your readers into thinking that your content is original, good luck fooling the legal authorities. That is because plagiarism is a legal issue as well. And if your case is severe, the chances are you might even have to face imprisonment and a heavy fine.

Moreover, search engines also prefer to rank unique (plagiarism-free) content higher in their search results.

These are the reasons why it is important that you make sure you are creating original and unique content as a professional writer.

Now, we will provide you with some methods that you can use to make sure you keep your work original and unique.

1. Effectively Rewrite Your Ideas:

As a professional writer, you will have to cover a wide range of topics according to the nature of your clients. In doing so, you will have to conduct deep research on these ideas to gather valuable and useful knowledge to add to your writing.

This process can be dangerous if you do not do it the right way.

What’s the right way? Effectively rewriting the ideas, you gain from your research.

Mostly, what happens is that writers tend to copy the content as it is from the source and do not rewrite it effectively. This can cause plagiarism.

Results of Poor Rewriting of Ideas:

Let’s try to understand this with an example. Suppose you are writing about Newton’s law of motion. You conduct your research and stumble upon a good definition on the website of NASA that you would like to add to your content (as shown in the image below.)

As a writer, you know that you cannot add the highlighted part as it is in your content. So you rewrite it; but not effectively. Here’s how poor rewriting results in\ (shown in the image to save this article from getting plagiarized):

And here’s the percentage of plagiarism in this poorly rewritten content:

As you can observe, changing a few words does not make your rewritten content plagiarism-free.

Results of Effectively Rewritten Ideas:

Here’s how effectively rewritten idea (the one explained above) looks like:

According to Newton’s first law, unless pushed out of its condition by the action of an external force, every object will continue to be at rest or in uniform motion along a straight line. Inertia is a natural tendency to resist changes in a state of motion.

And here’s the detected plagiarism in the content:

Yes, rewriting considering different factors can be a difficult and time-consuming task. But not if you know how to utilize technology. There are many online tools available on the Internet that can help you rewrite your content. You can google “online rewriter” or “online paraphrasing tools”, or some similar terms and you will get a huge list of rewriter tools.

Choose the one that is AI-powered because these article rewriter tools analyze your content and make essential changes in the structure and wording to make it unique. Conventional rewriters are mere article spinners or reworder and change words with synonyms without taking into consideration the context.

2. Add Quotations Correctly:

Another method of ensuring the uniqueness of your writing is by adding quotations correctly. You can obtain help revising your essay and ensuring you are adding quotations the proper way by hiring an English essay writing tutor. Quoting means expressing someone’s words that were said in your writing. It is used to strengthen your point of view by providing an expert’s view on it.

This helps you increase the authority and credibility of your writing. It also can help keep your content unique.

Adding quotations correctly in your content explains that the words that you are using in the writing are not yours and that you are expressing them as they were said word by word.

By applying this strategy to your content, you not only increase the authenticity of your writing but also keep it plagiarism-free. The right way to add these quotations in writing is by enclosing the said words in quotation marks or inverted commas (“..”)

Here are a few examples of quoted content:

In the meeting held on Tuesday, the CEO explained, “The primary goal for the marketing team this month is to boost up the reach on social media up to 19%.”

“Climate change has been drastically increasing in recent years.” (Aaron, 2019)

This is how you are to add quotations in your writing.

Well, in the second example given above, you can see that we have placed a name and a year in brackets. You might be wondering what is that. While providing quotations in your writing, you are to add citations at the end of the quote.

These citations are essential to be added in some types of writing and can be helpful to keep your content as unique as possible.

In fact, these citations are another point that we will discuss that can be helpful for you in keeping your writing unique and original.

3. Providing In-Text Citations Correctly:

Citing your source while adding information you took from someplace else is another important thing you can do to make sure that your work delivers originality.

Citing a source means that you provide details about where you got that information from, and who created/produced it.

The things that you have to mention while citing your source vary according to your writing style. The major writing styles and their citation methods are described below:

APA (American Psychological Association): The in-text citation in this method includes the author’s name and date e.g., (Aaron, 2019).

MLA (Modern Language Association): The in-text citations in this method are explained in the author-page number style e.g., (Aaron, 55). A reference page number is also added if required.
Chicago Manual of Style: Providing in-text in this style includes two methods. One uses using bibliography method and the other uses the author-date system.

These are the citation styles mostly used. Including these citations in your writing indicates that the information you have added is not originally yours. Somebody else has produced this information and you are adding it just to make your work authentic and relevant.

4. Adding a Reference Page:

Adding a reference page can be considered one of the most effective ways to increase the credibility as well as the originality of your writing. It is a separate section that is added at the end of the writing document.

In this section, you are to put in detailed information about the source you have taken the information from. But that is what citations are for, right? Yes, but they are brief. A reference page, however, contains detailed information about the source.

These references help the readers to explore the origin of the information further if they want to. This also helps clarify that the original information is not originally yours and you have borrowed it from somewhere else to demonstrate your point more effectively.

There is one thing you have to consider here. Just like the citations, the style of adding a reference page in your writing document also varies according to the writing style you have adopted.

Here are some examples of these reference pages:

APA Style (taken from Easybib):

MLA Style:

Both of these styles are very different from each other. That is the reason why you have to clarify the style of your writing before you add a reference page.

Conclusion:

That is pretty much it. Keeping your writing original and unique is the basic quality of a good writer and a responsibility for a professional writer. It not only helps you increase the authority and credibility of your work but also helps you rank your content higher in the search engine’s results.

In the information that we have provided above, you can find a compiled list of 4 of the best methods to ensure the originality and uniqueness of your written work. Make sure to apply them if you want to keep the content you are going to write next unique and original.