Fair Use of Other People's Writing

The question comes up constantly on writing lists--how much can you quote from someone else's work without having to get permission? Recently on one of my lists, which is for an organization of professional writers, one author wrote that she had found that a poem she wanted to use a line from in a story was still under copyright, so could she use it? Another writer replied suggesting that she just change one word and "be safe." I could not let that common misconception pass without comment, because coming from a pro, it would be accepted by many people as correct. So this is what I wrote:

Putting on my other hat, Professor of English, the answer is that you may quote a single line of poetry without getting permission, although you must credit it to its source. The reason you cannot change one word and be "safe" is two-fold.

First, this is a line from a well-known poem; to change one word is to misquote it. (It would be misquoting if it were a little-known poem too, of course, just not as obvious to your audience that you had made an error.)

Second, to change one word of any source and think you are paraphrasing rather than quoting is to perpetuate the myth that causes so many of our students to plagiarize in total innocence (probably the source of the majority of the plagiarism in the notorious Kansas case). Somehow the myth that you are not copying someone else's work (plagiarizing) if you change one word here and there has become a hydra with so many heads that the entire American Education Association can't cut them all off once and for all. Hence each stump grows seven new heads, and the myth spreads. As you can see, it has grown to the point at which experienced professional writers believe it (and may even believe they were taught it in school). We all "know" many things that are simply not true, and this particular myth is one of the most widely-held false beliefs among educated people.

High school teachers ought to disabuse students of this notion, but they can't manage it (especially when parents gang up to have the teachers disciplined if they dare suggest that students have misused sources and therefore deserve lower grades), and therefore I have to deal with it when students reach college with sloppy research habits that they believe are legal and "safe."

We, as professional writers, should know the rules. We set the examples.

First, to avoid plagiarism there are three requirements:

1. If you quote, quote accurately, and indicate either with quotation marks or formatting that it is a quote. Do not change a word or a piece of punctuation (other than comma or period at the very end), unless you mark those changes by conventional means (ellipses and brackets).

2. If you paraphrase, take the idea from the original and put it entirely into your own words. If there is a key phrase that absolutely has to be taken from the original, put that phrase in quotation marks. Make sure that your vocabulary and sentence structure are completely different from the original--substituting "large" for "big" and changing the tense of the verb is not paraphrasing; it is creating a bastardized semi-plagiarized mess that is too hard to fix, and will just have to be thrown away and started over. If you don't know how to paraphrase, quote. See 1 above for how to quote.

3. Credit your source either formally or informally, no matter whether you quoted or paraphrased.

Now, the above will save you from plagiarism, and is as far as you have to go if what you are writing is a classroom exercise (the typical theme or term paper). However, the moment you are writing for publication, which includes a master's thesis or a Ph.D. dissertation as well as everything professional writers write, you must go a step further and determine fair use. If a work is in the public domain (copyright has expired), you do not have to worry about fair use--you can use as much as you like, as long as you do not plagiarize (in this case plagiarism won't get you a lawsuit, but merely a bad reputation).

Fair use of any work still under copyright, however, is defined as no more than 300 words total throughout your work taken from a work of prose, and no more than a single line from a poem. (These are quotes, of course; you can paraphrase as much as you want.) You cannot use 200 words from a prose text on one page, twenty words on another, and 150 on a third, because that adds up to 370 words, 70 words over the allowed number. You cannot quote different lines from the same poem on different pages, either; it's one line for your entire work. However, you may quote one line from each of any number of different poems.

If you want to use more than is allowed by fair use, you must obtain written permission from the copyright holder.

That's it. It is just that simple--and yet people don't want to believe that those are the rules. That is why they end up in plagiarism disputes in school, and sometimes in the law courts should they become professional writers and continue to believe in and perpetuate the myth.


This page created with Arachnophilia.