When I was teaching, I’d always try to stress to my students how important it is to completely understand plagiarism and why it’s a horrible idea. I’d cite instances of reporters being fired from major publications and schools (especially colleges) suspending or expelling students for plagiarizing work. These, of course, are lessons and tales that all students hear about…
… and forget as adults, it would seem.
Now I’m a writer. I spend a good deal of time interacting with other writers, reading blogs, and immersing myself in what it means to publish online. It’s rather astounding to me that there are people who make careers out of online publishing (or try to) and still don’t truly understand what plagiarism is.
The general belief is that, “Oh, it’s just when you copy someone’s writing.”
Plagiarism is much more finely nuanced than simply copying someone’s writing. In fact, that’s something of a frustrating reduction.
It’s also one that serial plagiarists commonly use to excuse themselves from other dubious “borrowing” practices.
Because so many writers with good intentions don’t fully understand all the ways in which a person can plagiarize, they’re committing the act unknowingly. That’s a pretty big risk to take, as it only takes one major publication calling you out before you can land yourself in a world of trouble, legal fees, and lost trust.
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Content creation is a big job, and businesses don’t always have the time or resources necessary to support it in-house. Instead, they’ll often turn to some kind of secondary source, such as outsourced content or freelance writers to help them build out the content on their sites.
March 4th is 
Friends+ is one of the more annoying features that Facebook has rolled out recently, in my opinion. If you aren’t familiar, there was a period of time during which 
Growing up, I wrote almost as much as I read. I kept notebooks full of stories, stuffing them into my backpack to take them to school and type them on the computers. Invariably, anyone and everyone who read anything I wrote between birth and age 16 said something like, “Wow, that’s really good!”
In this world, you’re either an extrovert or you’re not.
Whether you’re doing it as a hobby or as part of your job, blogging can be tough. Everyone and his grandma has a blog these days. It becomes more and more difficult to get yourself noticed, regardless of how many times you tweet the link or post it to Facebook. Sure, your mom might be reading your blog along with a handful of your friends, but what about people you don’t know? What about people in your industry?
Today I celebrate my one year blogoversary with 
I’m not really one for New Year’s Resolutions, and there’s certainly been no shortage of those in the blogosphere lately, anyway.
