Just recently I followed up the work of someone who had done an article for a buyer and had used it in their showcase portfolio of work. The piece seemed stilted somehow, as though it had been hard to write, although the subject was easy to cover. It didn't flow, ideas were repeated, and there didn't seem to be the confident voice of a professional writer behind it. So I called up Google and did a search for the title. Up came some links and I visited the first one. Well guess what. This writer's article had been lifted and rejigged from another article, even including some comments that revealed the other writer's personality. It was so obvious this was a quick rehash done in what - 5 minutes? And clumsily.
The article may well have passed Copyscaping for sentence content and structure but the words were just in a different, mangled order. And yet - and yet!! - she had received good feedback for this article.
Does this kind of plagiarism and plundering matter in commercial writing? If you're up at the coal face, churning out articles for buyers who are trying to fill off-the-peg adsense websites with copy, then the buyer will get penalised by Google for duplicate copy and you as the writer will lose a client and probably not get paid. It's just a dumb thing to do.
So don't do it.

Image credit: PDClipArt
Where copywriting is concerned, there is a big divide between professional writers who do their own research, credit sources and write the whole damn thing themselves, and those who plunder, use article-spinning software, and turn out a load of horse manure. Maybe that's why many buyers on bid sites are not prepared to pay a decent rate. They're too used to horse manure and they know it's not worth much. Thank heaven for those buyers who know good writing when they see it.
No comments:
Post a Comment