As textbook and academic authors, your copyrights are your livelihood, and the value of your copyrights is often enhanced by registering them in the U.S. Copyright Office – something that you can easily do for yourself. Yet, as publishing and copyright attorneys, we find that many text and academic authors know less than they should about copyright registration. Here’s our sample Q&;A conversation with an author who wanted to know more about when, why, and how to register the author’s copyrights:
Quote or paraphrase? Three tips from a pro
It’s a pity when surface problems scuttle otherwise strong scholarship. As an academic editor, I’ve noticed that poorly handled quotations are particularly damning. Inelegant use of prior scholarship can give the impression that a writer is unsophisticated, or even amateur.
Naturally, research does involve mining books and articles to inform our own arguments, which are ideally novel and substantial but still reference that prior work. Often there may be temptation to repurpose existing literature that seems to say exactly what needs to be said in order to get to ideas that are original. It can certainly be difficult to think around the particular ways in which influential scholars have formulated cornerstone concepts.
Join us 5/18 for the TAA webinar, ‘5 Ways to Use Your Dissertation for Publications’
You spent a lot of time conducting research and writing a dissertation, thesis, or capstone project. You are well aware of the pressure to get your work published, in order to get hired or advance in your academic or professional field. Where do you start?
Janet Salmons, PhD, of Vision2Lead, Inc., mined every element of her dissertation to launch a publishing strategy that has resulted in five books, numerous chapters and cases, articles and blog posts. She created a typology of five options for drawing from, building on, or applying your student writing. This webinar is relevant those who have graduated recently as well as to people whose dissertations have been sitting on the shelf for a while.
Join us 3/10 for the TAA webinar, Get Organized With ‘OneNote’
Learn the power of Microsoft OneNote 2013, an unsung hero of Microsoft Office that can be used to organize your thoughts, ideas and projects in one place, accessible whenever and wherever you need them. Join us Thursday, March 10 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, “Get Organized With ‘OneNote”, for an overview of OneNote 2013, its features, and the ways to access and edit your OneNote notebooks from a PC to web browser, or mobile device. Register
The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: February 19, 2016
What sorts of strategies do you use to catapult you into your day’s writing? Do you do as Jerry Jenkins does and start the day with “a heavy edit and rewrite” of the “previous day’s work”? Maybe you do as Rachel Toor suggests: “leave off at a point where it will be easy to start again.” Rachel adds: “Some writers quit a session in the middle of a sentence; it’s always easier to continue than to begin.” Various other writers suggest using bullet points at the end of a writing session that point them in the direction they want the writing to go when they next return to it. Perhaps you have a completely different method altogether. If you do, I hope you will share it in the comments below this post. Happy writing!
The most useful textbook & academic writing posts of the week: February 12, 2016
Violets are blue
‘Revise and Resubmit’
Roses are a prickly bush or shrub
Violets are a herbaceous plant
Watch for more #AcademicValentines on Twitter throughout the weekend—you don’t even need a Twitter account to see all of the hilarious tweets!
Happy writing!