What Can You Do If Your Work Is Plagiarized?

By Sierra Pawlak

During the July 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on the topic of plagiarism, Micki Caskey, a Professor Emerita at Portland State University, shared her experience with having her work plagiarized.

“It was a shock to me that my work had been taken,” she said. “The reason I cared is because I worked really hard on that project. This was work I had committed a lot of intellectual space to, and I just was aghast that someone would take it. It’s not that I am the greatest author in the world, I just would like to be credited for the work that I’ve done.”

Caskey discovered her work had been plagiarized in 2021 when she went to update a piece she originally wrote in 2007 and had updated in 2014, a research summary on the developmental characteristics of young adolescents.

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WIPO Publishes Contracts Toolkit for Authors and Publishers

The World Intellectual Property Association (WIPO) has published a new toolkit for authors and publishers that includes “a checklist of the most essential considerations while drafting and concluding a contract.”

Contracts in Publishing: A Toolkit for Authors and Publishers, was drafted by Brian Wafawarowa, Chairperson of the Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA), and Isobel Dixon, a renowned South African poet and Head of Books at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in the UK, in consultation with several international author and publisher organizations.

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Academese: Are You Narrowing Your Audience By Not Speaking Their Language?

By Sierra Pawlak

During TAA’s May 2024 Conversation Circle, several members shared their experiences with ‘academese’ and tips for how academic writers can avoid it in their writing. Academese is characterized by writing that is heavily filled with jargon, overcomplicated language, and/or convoluted sentence structure (Wikipedia).

“The biggest sin in academic writing is the passive voice,” said Barbara Nostrand, an Aquisitions Editor at Gakumon and Senior Fellow at the de Moivre Institute. “It makes it much more difficult for the reader to understand what’s been written, and it’s completely unnecessary.” She recommends using the active voice instead, for example, ‘I saw’, ‘I observed’: “A trick to doing that is to move the verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible.”

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Daphne C. Watkins Receives Pynn-Silverman Lifetime Achievement Award From TAA

Daphne C. Watkins, a Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan, has been awarded the Pynn-Silverman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA). The award was established to honor individuals whose achievements over a career of devoted effort and service demonstrate the highest degree of commitment to excellence in authoring works to advance their discipline; encourage, enlighten and support the work of colleagues; and educate students in the field. The award is named for Ron Pynn and Franklin Silverman, two charter members of TAA who pursued and modeled these qualities in their own work.

“I am deeply honored to have been selected for this award,” said Watkins. “Thank you!”

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How Writing Can Make You Feel Good

By Angelica Ribeiro, PhD

Do you want to feel good after a writing session? If so, here’s what you should do.

As writers, we should consider three essential writing practices:

1. Write daily or regularly. In her book Becoming an Academic Writer, Patricia Goodson argues that including writing in our daily routine can be very beneficial because it can help us save emotional energy. She shares that “Having a designated, scheduled time to write, daily, tends to mitigate the emotional energy spent in moving through the day wondering, ‘When will I get to my writing?’”

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