Expert: Susan Rand - 1/6/2005

Question
Is it plagiarism to write a book doing the following: First I read a book chapter about 7 principles of success, each principle has its own headline within that chapter in bold letters. In my book I re-write the headline and I read each of the 7 principles (which are about 3 paragraphs each) and I put the book down and re-write it with my own words and add a few examples of my own. So it will have similar look and feel and roughly same number of words but all my own words.

Answer
Hello Al:

The short answer is "No."

The longer answer is: there are three ways to handle this:

1.  You may quote verbatim a few sentences from the book and will probably not get into any trouble over it, especially if you give credit.

2.  For a longer quote, you can contact the publisher and ask permission.

3.  You can paraphrase as you described it in your question, but make sure the examples and anything else you add really bring something new to the subject and don't just re-illustrate the same points the original author made. If you can't manage this, any editor that looks at it is going to say, "Hey, this sounds just like BLAH, BLAH by BLAH, BLAH. Sorry, we can't use it - it's already been done."

If you find you can only write your book by paraphrasing extensively from the other book, you are not yet ready to write your own. One way you might pharaphrase extensively would be to refute the author's points. Have you had enough life experience to have formed a conclusion about their validity? That's just a suggestion, of course.

I hope this helps. If it does, a nice rating would be greatly appreciated. I am proud of my high score over 360 questions.

And good luck with your writing!