Please Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

I have to be careful with this one. Curly and I agree that we want to keep ourselves as unidentifiable as possible on this blog, while remaining true to our peeve-prone selves. And sometimes that makes describing rant-inducing circumstances especially tricky.

One of my writing interests can be boiled down to providing guidance to other writers. Sometimes I'm paid for this. But as a service to the community (and to my research-driven self), I also provide plenty of it free of charge. Clearly, I don't expect to be paid monetarily for that. I love it when writers follow-up and let me know how my advice has helped or validated them, or how a market lead has led to a publication, or how their work has fared in a competition I led them to. That's another sort of compensation.

As is public acknowledgment.

I admit that I'm far from the first--or only--source of information out there for writers. There are plenty of others offering similar information, and when I point others to something I originally discovered from someone else, I give credit (and a weblink, as relevant). Maybe it's my academic background--the way source documentation was pounded into me--or maybe it's just a basic sense of fairness at work. Either way, even if I'm framing a piece of information differently, I have to attribute the original source.

And I'm mightily peeved when other writers--who clearly know better--don't do the same. When I post something one day and it shows up the next on someone else's blog or newsletter for writers without any attribution whatsoever.

Wait, it gets better. Because some of the worst offenders (who use "my" information to build up [paying] subscriber bases] have the gall to ask me to publicize competitions they run (including competitions which charge entry fees!).

I'm especially peeved when I see some of these writers cited on discussion boards or actually recognized by various "best of" lists. Then they tout those credentials as well, even on the sig lines they include with the e-mails they send me with their requests to do more for them.

To be fair, some people, when I share my concerns with them, apologize and rectify the errors of their ways. But some don't. And that peeves me. And usually leads to more rants.

--Prunella