Please note that I am not a professional writer - no one has yet paid me for anything I have written.  But I’ve been writing creatively off and on since I was nine years old, and that’s NOT in dog years.  During that time, there are several things I’ve learned that I think will be helpful to you, the novice writer.  I present them here in the hopes that you will not only learn something new, but retain it for future reference.

First, I’d like to cover something that I learned in junior high school (and my kids are learning in elementary school - how things change).  Whether you are writing a novel, writing your first blog post, or writing for a magazine or a newspaper a very important thing to keep in mind is how you present someone else’s work.  If you’ve ever done a term paper, you’ve spent hours pouring over encyclopedias, books, and reference material while copying relevant snippets onto note cards for inclusion in your paper.  You select items that support your premise, and you include them in quotations and with a citation number to correspond to your bibliography.

This is known as “crediting the source”, or more simply “citing”.  Any time you use something that someone else created, whether it is an image, a piece of text, or a video or audio clip, you need to CITE THE SOURCE.  It is not only ethical, in many cases it may be a requirement of using the material.  YOU, the author, are responsible for adhering to copyright whether it is a full-blown license or a creative commons license.  It used to be that anything protected by copyright included either the phrase “Copyright yyyy by XXXX”, or included the copyright symbol  ©.  This  is no longer true.  If it's been produced by someone else, consider it to be copyright protected. 

Usually, when something is protected by copyright, you are required to obtain written permission from the creator before you use the material.  There are instances where this is not the case, which fall under what is legally known as “fair use”.  Fair use is a very grey area that can be as confusing as copyright liability, so when in doubt about your ability to use someone else’s material DON’T USE IT.

Citing your source protects you from charges of plagiarism.  There is no minimum sentence count that determines what is and isn’t plagiarism; simply put, if you’ve copied a single sentence or a significant portion of one, you need to cite your source.  It puts you in the best possible light when you do, and it makes you seem more professional. Yes, even if it’s nothing more than a blog post, if it’s someone else’s material, you need to cite it.

Using photos and images becomes a little less tricky, because finding content is extremely easy.  The pitfall is in how you search for your content, because search engines can sometimes present misleading information.  Again, the onus is on you, the author, to determine if you are properly using material.  Just because a photo appears in a search engine does not mean it is available for public use.  A good example (and one I imagine most people would relate to) is Google’s Web Images search.

I’ve attached a screen capture to better display my point, but basically when you are presented with the main search screen it seems very straightforward - but it isn’t.  Doing a search from the main screen will default to images of any size, any file type, any colors and most importantly images that are not filtered by any license.  Now, on the surface that seems to indicate it is returning images that are not protected by any copyright license - but the exact opposite is true.  What it is doing is mixing in images that are protected by full copyright with those that have only a creative commons license and the difference determines whether your use of the image is legal or not.

Creative Commons licenses typically spell out the terms under which an image may be reused, whether commercially or non-commercially.  Most often you will find CC licenses that speak of re-use regarding derivative works, which means you may take the image and alter it.  Regardless, though, almost every one I’ve ever seen still requires you to give attribution for the photo.  Attribution is a word that is frequently used in both image and text re-use, and for those who don’t want to rush to the dictionary it is the same as citing your source.

So, when you go to Google’s home page and click on the Images hotbutton, make sure you also go to the right hand side of the search box and click on the ADVANCED SEARCH feature.  This will bring up more search option, and for you the author the most important one for images is the USAGE RIGHTS box.  Usually, you will be looking for images that are “labeled for reuse” but if you are presenting a piece that will result in a paycheck of any size you will need to find images that are “labeled for commercial reuse”.  If you are going to modify the image in any way, then obviously you would need the “labeled for reuse with modification” or the commercial option of the same.

Another useful thing for you to do is to click on the MORE INFO link next to the USAGE RIGHTS box.  It explains in simple terms what is expected of you, the searcher, regarding content you are searching for.  READ IT.  It will make things much clearer for you.

Images that are returned are those indexed by Google’s search engine.  If you click on an individual image, it will bring up that image in a thumbnail on the top of the page while showing the web page the image was found on at the bottom.  For you, the person looking to reuse that image, the important words are directly under the thumbnail image - “Image may be subject to copyright”.  Again, most importantly, THE ONUS IS ON YOU TO DETERMINE IF YOU CAN SAFELY USE THE PHOTO.  You should contact the author of the web page to determine copyright.

This is one reason why all the photos I use are either my own or are protected by Creative Commons licenses allowing reuse with attribution.  I don’t have to hunt down the photographer to get permission to use their work because they’ve established the terms and conditions of reuse in the CC license.


How To Write Better:

My spelling and grammar tend to be atrocious.  The advent of word processing software has helped me tremendously, but I’ve also learned that things like spelling and grammar checkers can be a hindrance as well as a help.  Since I tend to use WordPerfect at home and MS Word at work, I’ll speak specifically to those pieces of software - your mileage may vary.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that, while spellcheck works reasonably well if you seriously mis-spell a word, it sometimes misses things in the overall sentence structure.  For example, if you meant to type “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” but instead typed “It was the best of times, is was the worst of times”, “is” won’t show up as a mis-spelled word (because, of course, “is” is spelled quite correctly) and it won’t show up in the grammar check.  Nothing beats another set of eyes proofing your material.  Spell check and grammar check are good to catch blatant errors, but for the more subtle ones you will need to come back to your piece at a later date and view it with fresh eyes.  Even then, my recommendation would be to have someone else read it for proper sentence structure and spelling.  Others will catch mistakes you commonly miss yourself.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the work of several authors on Open Salon, and to name them all would take up too much space.  I note that they too have the occasional mis-spelled word or incorrect contraction, but I also note that these people do this rather infrequently.  One of my favorite critics has been jimmymac1025, because Jim is not only an excellent writer but an excellent reader.  He has offered me constructive criticism on several occasions, and each time he was an immense help.  One of the things Jim pointed out, which I had always previously done in the past, was the need to generate drafts.  Many drafts.  Now, I used to write somewhere along the lines of four to five drafts of a piece I was working on before I felt it was “done” and ready for the final draft.  But Jim noticed, as I started posting fiction pieces here, that I had a tendency to rush my work and post first or even second drafts instead of final drafts.

He was absolutely right, and that’s something you as a writer should consider as well.  You’re not on deadline here, and even if you were it is far better to turn out a polished product than an unfinished one.  Give yourself days, weeks if necessary, to produce your final product.  It will be better for it, and so will you.

This has been probably one of the most wordy pieces I’ve produced, so I’ll stop here with a brief summarization:

1) Always give credit where credit is due: cite your sources

2) It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY as an end user to determine if something is protected by copyright.  When in doubt, DON’T USE IT.

3) There is NO MINIMUM SENTENCE COUNT for plagiarism.  If you’ve used someone else’s words, GIVE THEM CREDIT FOR IT.

4) Learn to use search engines properly when looking for available content.

5) YOU are responsible for adhering to copyright on licensed work!

6) Making several drafts is actually a good thing!

7) The PROOF is in the proofREADING!!!  Have someone else give your piece a once-over whenever possible.

Screen capture courtesy of Google Search.

Copyright 2010 by Bill Schwartz - All Rights Reserved.

But you knew that anyway.  ;-D

*Just a quick nod once more to jimmymac1025 - you have been an incredible inspiration and tutor, and I thank you sincerely.