Re: Portfolio Samples -- Yours, Mine and Ours

Subject: Re: Portfolio Samples -- Yours, Mine and Ours
From: Dianne Blake <write-it -at- HOME -dot- COM>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:37:52 -0700

> EMMY_ARICIOGLU -at- HP-ROSEVILLE-OM3 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM wrote:
> <snip> is it now OK to just lift entire sentences, paragraphs,
> sections from another writer's work and put your name on it -- because
> you, the writer, don't own the work, the company does, and we all
> work for the same company, so it can't be plagiarism, it's called
> leveraging?

It has been my experience that companies usually expect the "borrowing"
of other people's "contributions" to a document. In a company I just
worked for, they were surprised that I could interview software
developers and then go out on my own and write technical documents. In
the past, the developers would write the documents and then the TWs
would go in and rearrange the text to make it more readable (developers
have a different style of writing). The TWs really had no in-depth
idea of how the product worked, so they couldn't reason check their
work. The developers then had to go back and edit their own writing. --
Does this sound familiar?

The job of many TWs is to take the information from around the company
(marketing, sales, R&D, etc.) and mold it into the appropriate
documents. So in a way the document is designed and shaped by the TW
even though the content itself is not. Many company document deadlines
tell you that they are not really looking for writers, so much as
editors who can pull information from many sources and massage it into
something functional and readable. That seems to be the nature of the
beast.

For Portfolios though, I think what is important here is that the TW
describes their part in the creation of the document. Did they actually
write it, did they edit and pull the information together? If they did
write portions of the document, then these portions should be
highlighted as their "writing" experience. These are all different and
valuable skills. It is just important that the person evaluating the
portfolio knows what it is that they are evaluating.

That is my two cents worth. As far as ethics for creating a portfolio.
Heck, I feel bad if someone edited my document before I add it to my
portfolio.

-Dianne Blake
write-it -at- home -dot- com

From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=


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