Skip to content

Andy Unedited

  • About Andy
  • Write Better

Andy Unedited

Exploring Books, Life, and Writing

Footnote Your Talks

June 15, 2021 by Andy Le Peau

Once I received a letter from a reader who said that a book published by the firm I worked for had plagiarized his own writing. This was a serious charge and a rather shocking accusation because our book was written by a senior scholar with a stellar reputation. Could this be possible?

What made the case more interesting was that the writer of the letter said he had been a student of this scholar some fifteen years before. The scholar, claimed the student, had incorporated some of the student’s paper into the book we published. And he provided evidence. Several paragraphs from his paper matched exactly or very closely portions of the book.

We sent the material on to the author for his comment. After reviewing it, he admitted it was true. How had it happened?

The author thought the student’s paper was excellent and began referring to it, even reading from it, in his lectures over the next several years. Slowly, in his class notes, the student’s name became detached from the quotations. Then the quotation marks disappeared. When it came time to write a book based on these lectures, the author had forgotten where this material in his notes had come from and assumed it was all his own.

How did we resolve this? We and the author agreed to revise the book in the next printing. We put the student’s material in quotation marks and gave due credit in the footnotes.

The Lesson to Be Learned: Whenever you prepare a talk, a sermon, or a lecture—always footnote your speaking notes as if it were to be published. You never know when you might take some old material (even decades later) and work it into a published piece. Include not only the name of the person responsible for the quote (or for the point of fact) but also, the name of the book, the publisher, date of publication, and page number. Then you won’t have to spend hours trying to track it down—which can sometimes be impossible, even in the internet era. I know—I’ve tried.

Corollary: When speaking, give credit to your sources, whether quoted or summarized. You can’t give full bibliographic information since that would make your talk impossible to listen to. But you can say, “As David Brooks says in his new book . . .” That is intellectually honest (you didn’t come up with the idea), and it doesn’t unduly interrupt the flow of your talk.

—

photo credit: Adrian Schweiz (Pixabay)

Post navigation

Previous Post:

Advice to Publishers–From a Previous Century

Next Post:

John Through Old Testament Eyes

One comment

  1. D'Vorah Meijer says:
    July 13, 2021 at 8:46 am

    I tried to find a possibility to contact you. I just send out a prophetic word and teaching on my website and while I was searching for a scripture:
    ——15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. Revelation 3:15-16 ——–
    I found your website with a splendid explanation about the difference between hot and cold the LORD is talking about. I shared your link and the explanation:
    https://www.devorahcoaching.com/post/knowledge-wisdom-the-last-days

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

My Books

Categories

Subscribe to Andy Unedited

Loading

Archives

Recent Posts

  • We Aren’t As Reasonable As We Think
  • The Secret to Not Being Manipulated
  • Reading Among Friends
  • Being a True Patriot
  • Writing to Influence People

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
© 2022 Andy Unedited | WordPress Theme by Superbthemes