Writing Tips - How to Avoid Redundant Articles

If you write a large number of articles, you may forget what you have and haven't written about. This article will give you some tips on how to avoid redundant articles.

I have been doing a lot of writing over the last couple of years, and I found that sometimes I had to stop and think to remember if I'd written about a certain topic before. It can get annoying to have to go online and check through everything you've published to make sure. So I now have a system that keeps me from writing redundant articles, and also helps me come up with new ones.

It's actually rather simple. All you need to do is make a list of every article that you've ever written. I have a document on my computer that has the title of each article and a link to where it's posted online. I set them up in an outline format, grouped by topic and sorted alphabetically. This helps me quickly find articles on the topic I'm wondering about.

Whenever I think that I may have already written an article about a particular topic, I check the list. If I have already covered it, I move on. If I haven't I write about it. I also keep a list of all my article ideas, and I periodically compare this to the list of articles I've already written, and remove any ideas that have already been turned into articles.

Not only will keeping a list of all the articles you've already done keep you from accidentally writing the same content again, it can also help you come up with new ideas. When you realize that you've already written about the topic you have in mind, you can use this as an opportunity to cover a new aspect of the topic. Look over what you already wrote, and see if you can make a new article that covers a different facet of the topic, or write an article that goes into more specific detail on something you mentioned in passing. When you use your master article list in this way, it can greatly help you to write more focused and detailed material. You know you've already covered the basics, now you can delve deeper and provide more detail and information to your readers.

If titles and links aren't quite enough, or you can't always get online, add a brief synopsis of your article along with the title to help you know exactly what you covered in each piece. No writer wants to have redundant articles, so add as much to your list as you need to avoid creating duplicate content.

If you're a new writer, I suggest starting a list as soon as possible. Tracking down and documenting everything you've ever written after you already have hundreds of articles can be very daunting. If you start keeping a list early in your writing career, it will be easier to keep it up-to-date. This master article list will be a great tool for avoiding redundant articles and creating new and more detailed content in the future.