LET'S COMMUNICATE
Agriculture Communication Newsletter
December 2000, No. 60

CONTENTS

WRITE THE RIGHT WORD 
ELECTRONIC COPYING AND COPYRIGHT

WRITE THE RIGHT WORD

"If you can't convince them, confuse them."-- Harry S Truman

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Over the past few months we have offered some suggestions for becoming a better writer, including reading to recognize good writing, becoming better acquainted with the general rules of grammar and punctuation, and developing a set of principles to guide the writing process. Now we can't put it off any longer. To become a better writer, you have to write. Becoming good at any skill, be it playing the piano or playing golf, takes practice. Writing is no different. You have plenty of opportunities every day in the form of e-mail notes, correspondence, reports the list goes on. When you do these chores, give some thought to the writing process. Who am I writing this for? What do I want the message to accomplish? Am I striking an appropriate tone for the audience and purpose? Is the grammar correct? Does the whole thing really make sense? What becoming a better writer really means is just being more conscious of what your writing is saying and how your reader will perceive it. Yes, you can do it.

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If you want to get serious about practicing, an exercise some creative writing instructors suggest is to take a piece of writing you like fiction, a magazine article, whatever and just retype it. You may have seen a TV clip promoting a new movie in which a reclusive writer played by Sean Connery mentors a young aspiring writer. He hands the young man a manuscript and tells him to start typing it, and then, when he feels his own words start to come, type them instead.

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To the more mundane, the writers' group from Agricultural Communicators in Education had some e-mail discussion on how to punctuate the term "farmers market"-- A. Farmer's market; B. farmers' market; C. farmers market, or D. market for people who grow stuff. A. doesn't work unless the market consists of only one farmer. B. is most correct--the apostrophe after the "s" denotes a group possessive. C. is probably often used, but it's just not correct. And some respondents admitted that D. is very tempting.

ELECTRONIC COPYING AND COPYRIGHT

Materials in electronic format are subject to basically the same copyright rules as items printed on paper. That means that electronically copying and distributing without permission violates the law just as making unauthorized paper copies does.

A very common example: if you download an article from a newspaper or magazine Web site and post it to an e-mail news group, you have made and distributed copies. Unless you have specific permission, or the site grants permission to circulate items, you are probably violating the law.

You may fall under fair use, which means you must meet conditions of brevity and spontaneity. The material may be public domain, but don't count on that unless it is produced by a U.S. government agency. And there is implied license, which means the material is intended for distribution (news releases from the NDSU ag Web sites would be an example).

To be safe, don't distribute articles from commercial advertising-supported sites.