In today’s workplace, effective promotional writing is now a necessity. Besides writing copy for printed material such as brochures, product sheets, and visual aids used in sales presentations, companies and organizations now need to produce content for web sites, blog posts, press releases, and social media.
A common way to begin a writing task is to search the internet for ideas and to see what others have written on a particular topic. While this helps stimulate your thinking and expand your knowledge, it also can lead to questionable writing practices such as borrowing heavily from a source without citing it, paraphrasing that remains very close to the original, unconscious plagiarism, and even copyright infringement.