I was recently hired to write a book based on the ideas of a couple of thought leaders who’d built a fair-sized consulting company. My job of gathering source material started with interviewing their colleagues about the idea frameworks that they used in their practices. During one of these interviews, I had a very odd…
Nonfiction books come from source material. The source material is usually the intellectual property of other authors. That means it should be footnoted, with proper citations in a common, officially accepted format like MLA or the Chicago Manual of Style. People hate doing this. They put it off. And that tends to lead to errors….
Building a book is a major undertaking. At the start, it seems like anything is possible (and it is). But as you close in on completing it, challenges lurk — problems that can cost you time and energy and eat into your success. Here’s an incomplete list of the unsuspected land mines that can blow…
Newsletter 24: Why Claudine Gay had to go, a Mickey Mouse horror film, Tolkien’s victorious ghost, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and how to successfully write your book in 2024. Reflections on the plagiarism that brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay Harvard president Claudine Gay has now resigned. She made the…
Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has now changed some passages in work she wrote to address charges of plagiarism. Harvard’s investigation concluded, “the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two…
“I found it on the internet.” “My researcher found it for me.” “My coauthor write that part.” “My ghostwriter wrote that part.” [For ghostwriters] “My client wrote that part.” “I thought it was in the public domain.” “The author is dead.” “It had a Creative Commons license.” “I changed a bunch of words in it.”…
All books rest on other people’s ideas. There is no such thing as completely original content. Your job is to build on those ideas, not to hide where you got them. As an author, you have these responsibilities: Citing the ideas of others makes your work stronger, not weaker. You didn’t invent Net Promoter Score,…
Artificial intelligence writing software is now good enough to write decent student essays. If a student turns in such an essay, is that cheating? And what are we going to do about it? Aki Peritz wrote about the problem in Slate and Jeff Schatten pondered it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Both pieces include…
A New York Times article with an inflammatory title suggests that, according to new scholarly research, Shakespeare’s plays drew heavily on a manuscript by another author. For Shakespeare scholars, this is a revelation. For the rest of us, it’s a good demonstration of the difference between plagiarism and inspiration. The title of the Times article is “Plagiarism…