Thursday 29 November 2012

Ghost Writing Equivalent to Plagiarism?

I friend of mine recently made a point that I should not project myself as a “plagiarist”. She added that since ghost writing is like steeling, it is nothing but plagiarism. She also said that she considered me to be an honest person and did not think I would EVER do such a dreadful act. (She was reading my Intro on this blog of mine.)

For me ghost writing is any piece of text that you create with which you cannot tag your name to acknowledge the world of the authorship.

When I think of Ghost Writing, several things come to my mind that can be considered so (some help taken from Wikipedia's topic "Ghostwriter" in compiling my following list):
  • Writing articles for a blog or publication.
  • Contributing to a book.
  • Helping someone not good in a language to express their ideas in a decent way (for a blog, or forum, or Facebook status etc).
  • Drafting or editing somebody's autobiography
  • Preparing a speech or public statement for a politician.
  • Preparing a presentation for an administrative or managerial person.
  • Writing profession or career based articles for consultants of respective domain.
  • Preparing a technical document for a client.
  • Compiling a project proposal for someone.

I consider all of the above points ethical and am willing to indulge in this, provided I am not exploited to do so. If due compensation is paid, I would be more than happy to do any and all of the above (and more too).

Now I can think of some other ghost writing tasks also that are unethical in my opinion: 
  • Writing a thesis for a student.
  • Preparing a paper or report for a student.
  • Doing an assignment for a school, college or university student. 
I never have done this and nor do I plan to do so even if it is a highly paid job.

People are ghosting almost all the time. The work we do in our office is not always tagged with our name. Artisans who prepare beautiful items seldom carve or embroider their names on each masterpiece they create. I have never seen workmen like carpenters, tailors, carpet weavers and cooks leaving their initials on the items they prepare and the work they do. The compensation everybody is getting in almost all of these cases is monetary. People are getting paid to do all this. They are providing their expertise and creating their respective contributory substances in exchange for wages or payments. We can’t label all these and similar people “plagiarists”, now can we?

Anybody can have their own views about anything. And mine about ghost writing are that it is not equivalent to ‘plagiarism’. One just needs to set the right ethical limits according to one's beliefs.

Wednesday 28 November 2012

I finally Blogged!

I finally blogged today, after a hiatus of many months and took some pictures too! Yay!

I took some pictures. Used those pictures in a blog. Am using that blog link here to increase my post count on this blog also. (How clever of me!) Will share this post on my Facebook to increase viewership and my blog visit count. (How super genius of me!) And someone might share my Facebook post on their timeline and their friends would read and re-share the link. And this might go on and on and on till the traffic on my blog would crash the visit counter and servers. And then i would be featured on notable forums for causing such a chaos. And i would feel so proud. And then and then and then.........and then i would roll over, fall from my bed with a great thud and wake up. *Ooppss*


Oh i almost forgot to share the link of that blog. Here goes ;-)


http://islamabad.metblogs.com/?p=3336