Giving credit

There has been plenty of back-and-forth lately over Barack Obama's use of lines originally delivered from his pal and adviser Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. I'm not going to offer my opinion regarding this campaign season dust-up, but it does raise the question of how and when you credit others' work or ideas in your writing.

The rule we learned in college was that in written works you must acknowledge another's ideas and words in the body of your text and in footnotes or endnotes and through a bibliographic citation. In the world of business writing, those rules don't seem that fixed. But certainly the concept of crediting others remains.

As a general guideline, the closer you can adhere to the formality of footnotes and citations, the better. How close you need to stick with these rules depends a lot on the type of communication you're assembling. Case studies and white papers should be thoroughly annotated with regard to sources. The same probably would hold for formal reports and proposals. As for memos and e-mails, I say forego footnotes and bibliographic citations, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't credit your source. Just slip the credit smoothly into the copy itself using wording like "according to .....:" or "In his 'Tactics' article 'Journalists get Web 2.0: Do you?' Mike Neumeier says ...."

The idea is to not only give credit but to equip your readers with enough information that they can find the source material themselves if they wish.

There is also a practical advantage to detailing your sources in what you write: It forces you to take a hard look at them. Knowing that you'll be identifying your sources and that your readers will be judging their appropriateness makes you more likely to use only the most reliable ones.