Priceless Writing TipsUsing Samples: Playing It Safe

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As freelancers with us, it is clear that you deal with new work all the time. You are doing one assignment after another on widely differing topics, under tight deadlines. Furthermore, you are usually working by yourself. It is really hard to do this all without guidance, or a lot more detailed instructions than we usually receive from customers!

A lot of you use samples, as a visual aid to structure your work, or to help understand a particular topic. But some of you, sometimes, take this practice in the wrong direction; by using these samples as your own work, or simply ripping them off.

Shame on you, if you actually use the text of a writing sample in your own papers. You need to realize that you are committing plagiarism by doing this is illegal. That poses a huge risk to your position with us.

How can you use the samples properly? It’s easy! You need to remember that samples are usually just guidance for the specific demands of a certain type of paper.

You need to use them as an overall model for structure and layout. You need to realize that a sample paper has a unique context, which your current assignment topic probably does not share. Go ahead and check out the organization of ideas, and look for catchy phrases (especially graceful transitions from one topic to another).

But in no way do you have the right to copy the text itself and represent it as your own. That is plagiarism, and is actually illegal. It can get you into serious trouble.

You need to remember that your writing only has value if you put your intellect, personal opinion and hard work into it.

I know that this stuff is pretty basic, but we need to point it out again because we have had a number of disturbing incidents. The strange part is that these occurred with experienced writers, who should have had more professional integrity!

We are hoping that none of you, dear readers, practice anything like this. We believe in your personal writing talent and want you to demonstrate it fully to us!!!

Good luck with your work!!