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LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR WRITERS:Libel, Doctoring Quotes

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LESSON 44
LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR WRITERS
The press in this country these days is among the freest in the world. The brilliance of our forebears was
in linking press freedoms with the other guaranteed freedoms -- religion, right of assembly and speech
and redress of grievances. This intertwining of revered freedoms has made it doubly difficult to tinker
with the free status of the press, no matter how volatile public opinion may become. (And, unfortunately,
in times of national unrest, there are always a few "public-spirited" individuals who would like to see one
or another of the First Amendment freedoms curtailed.)
No government can afford to give blanket freedom to its press system.
Legal and ethical considerations for writers
As free as the press may be in this country, there are still certain restrictions and limitations that writers
must keep firmly in mind. The most important of these, for your purposes, are the laws pertaining to libel,
privacy and copyright. However, there are also some pertinent ethical restrictions not governed by law.
Ethics are a personal, private matter to be decided by each writer according to the dictates of conscience,
but publishing etiquette demands adherence to some basic ethical principles.
Libel
Libel is a false statement about a living person that does damage to that person's reputation in the
community in which he or she lives. It may also cause embarrassment or humiliation, or affect a person's
ability to make a living. The four most commonly cited classic examples of libel (though some sound
antiquated and naive), called libel per Se, would be to charge someone falsely with the commission of a
crime, or to suggest that a woman is unchaste, or to charge that someone has or has had a loathsome or
contagious disease or to bring discredit on someone in his or her profession, such as calling a doctor a
quack or claiming that a lawyer is an ambulance chaser.
If you, through carelessness or malice, make a libellous statement about a person, you could easily end up
in court. And that can cost you time, anxiety and money. There are three kinds of damages that a libel
claimant can ask a court to award. The first is general damages, granted for injury to reputation. The
second is special damages for specific pecuniary loss -- which means a true monetary loss, such as an
erosion of business or losing one's job as a result of the libel. An outside source is usually required to
prove the extent of special damages, unless the libel is per se, one of the four classic examples given
above, in which case no proof of actual damages is necessary. The final form of damages is punitive, and
is usually sought by the claimant as a punishment against an author or a publisher for making the mistake.
Punitive damages can be awarded only if the writer or publisher has shown reckless disregard or
malicious intent to harm, meaning they knew the statement was false or had reason to suspect it might be
false.
Mistakes are easy to make. You might think only that you have a solid piece of information, or you might
copy a name wrong from your research notes or you might quote a person incorrectly in a way that makes
him or her look incompetent. So lesson number one in avoiding libel difficulties is: Be careful. Check and
double-cheek your facts. If you've written something that appears to be libellous on the face of it, make
sure you can trust your notes. Most good newspapers and magazines have legal advisers to worry and fret
over possible actionable material, but even the best of lawyers miss a few. The job begins with the writer.
If you are sure of your facts and can back them up, then much of the danger is behind you. If you're not
so certain of your facts, think long and hard before you use them.
If a potentially libellous statement slips through and you end up in court, how do you protect yourself?
For years, the most frequently used defences were the common law defences: truth, fair comment, fair
report of a judicial or official proceeding. Then, in the landmark The New York Times v. Sullivan ruling in
1964, the Supreme Court opened a new door to libel defence. The plaintiff, Sullivan, was a public official,
a police commissioner who charged that he had been libelled in a civil rights advertisement that ran in
The New York Times. The Supreme Court, overturning an Alabama court decision that found in favour of
Sullivan, said that a public official could not maintain a suit for damage to reputation unless the official
could prove that the libellous statement was published with actual malice. You've heard the term before.
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It has nothing to do with the dictionary definition of malice. Actual malice, as defined by the court, means
that the writer or publisher either knew that the statement was false or went ahead and published it with a
reckless disregard for whether or not is was false. This decision has since expanded to include public
figures--people who are consistently in the public eye, such as very well-known professional athletes and
entertainers and other celebrities.
"Neutral reportage" usually occurs when a writer has written an accurate report about a public figure
based on information received from a reliable source. Even if the reporter doubts the truth of the material,
he is protected in some jurisdictions because he has made an accurate and "neutral" report.
Invasion of privacy
If you think libel laws are confusing, wait until you get into the ticklish rights of privacy. From the
standpoint of the writer, this is a scary and dangerous area.
Traditionally, there are four separate divisions to the tort of invasion of privacy. You can fall afoul of the
law if you cast someone in a false light; if you reveal intimate details of someone's life; if you
misappropriate someone's name or likeness; or if you intrude physically into someone's private life.
The first area is vaguely similar to libel. You can cast someone in a false light in one of three ways. You
can take a factual situation and embellish it (by adding dialogue or thought patterns, for example). You
can take a factual situation and fictionalise it (the kind of thing we see in TV docudramas, complete with
actions and reactions that may not have taken place). Or you can take a factual situation and distort it (by
leaving things out, or changing the meaning). Any of these situations can lead to a "false light" invasion-
of-privacy suit.
But a key difference between libel and a false-light invasion of privacy is that the false-light tort does not
require proof that the statement is defamatory.
The second sort of privacy touches on the publication of intimate and embarrassing personal details of
someone's life. It might be as simple as reporting that a professional cricket player sleeps on a bed of
nails as a form of toughening up, or it might be a shocking revelation of the bizarre sexual preferences of
a movie star. The real problem here is that even if you are telling the absolute truth, and has photographs
and signed affidavits to prove it, the mere publication of hitherto unknown peculiar personal habits can
get you in trouble.
The third form is easier to understand. It encompasses the misappropriation of someone's name or
likeness for commercial purposes. Traditionally, that means you can't use someone's name or photograph
in an advertisement endorsing a product without that person's express permission. Lately, however, this
law has sprouted a few extra tentacles and has reached out to examine works of fiction in which real
people are used as peripheral figures. There are even arguments as to whether or not the estates of dead
people can take issue with the use of a late celebrity's name or likeness for commercial purposes. These
new applications are still fluid in our country, but if they ever firm up they could open new problem areas
for writers and publishers.
The final area of invasion of privacy has only slight potential for involving newspaper feature and
magazine article writers. It deals primarily with physical intrusion in a person's private life --
unauthorised wiretaps, trespassing on private property to gather information, seeking interviews under
false pretences, stealing photographs, unreasonable intrusion in a person's private affairs. In general,
cases are decided by punishing the unreasonable intrusion, not the publication that develops from it. But if
the publication falls in the second area--publication of intimate and embarrassing personal details--the
method in which the information was gained might be considered a damning circumstance and go against
you.
Copyright Law/Copyright protection
Copyright law is designed to protect the work of the individual writer, yet few writers seem to understand
how it works and what it actually protects. For one thing, if you are the author of a copyrighted magazine
article, you don't own the facts contained in that article. All you really own are the words you used to
describe those facts. Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted.
There are several good reasons for a writer to do his or her best to understand copyright law, but the two
main reasons are these: First, you have to learn as much as you can about copyright regulations in order to
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increase your own protection and rights as a writer; second, you'd better understand the rights of other
writers before you start incorporating their facts and words into your own work.
In general, copyrighting an unpublished or published article is extremely simple. The law provides
automatic copyright protection for all unpublished material from the moment it is written. Material
written after March 1, 1989, which is later published, also receives automatic copyright protection. As a
result, use of the familiar copyright notice (the word "Copyright" or the symbol 0, the year the work was
created and the name of the copyright holder) is voluntary--but recommended--for such material, as is
registration with the Copyright Office. By the way, one copyright for a magazine is enough to protect all
contributions in that issue of the magazine--including your particular article.
But that doesn't hold true for newspaper writers. Under the current law, if your writing efforts are "work
made for hire," then the copyright falls to the employer. That means a newspaper reporter has no
individual protection for stories written in the line of duty. A reporter may write a book or a magazine
article on private time and get protection, but if he or she is writing as an agent of the newspaper, on
company time, the stories belong to the parent organization. That's why columnists have to get
permission before they can publish collections of their columns.
But assume you're a freelancer and that you own the rights to every original piece of work that you write.
You are not actually selling your articles to magazines or newspapers when you submit them and collect
your checks. Rather, you are licensing the publisher to reproduce your work and publish it. You are
giving the publisher paid access to certain rights.
If a magazine requests your article under these terms and you agree, you give up the right to use the
material in the same form at any later date. That means you can't sell it to anyone else for a reprint, use it
later as part of a book, or option it to the movies.
First Serial Rights
This means a magazine or newspaper (or any other periodical that publishes regularly in an ongoing, or
"serial," fashion) has the right to run your article first. After that, the rights revert to you. First serial
rights are usually designated as first North American serial rights, or first serial rights.
Second Serial Rights
This usually refers to reprint rights after some other magazine has run your article, though it also covers
first-time printing rights for a chapter or an essay from a book that you may have published.
Simultaneous Rights
This won't happen often, but you may have occasion to use it. If you have a timely article that appeals to
more than one market and the markets do not have overlapping or competing readerships, you may wish
to specify to an editor that you are submitting the piece elsewhere at the same time and offer only
simultaneous rights.
There are other terms, of course, such as world rights. Rights to the articles you have been reading in this
book, for example, were assigned to the authors as nonexclusive world rights in all languages. That
allows the authors of this book and the publisher to market around the world, even in translation, without
affecting any other rights of the original writers.
Copyright infringement
Just as the copyright law protects you from piracy of your work, it also serves to protect other writers
from misuse of their materials when you are researching a new article. The Copyright Act tries to give us
a clear picture of what constitutes infringement. It states that anyone who violates the exclusive rights of
the copyright owner has infringed on that copyright. Then it goes on to list those rights. They are:
1. Reproduction of the copyrighted work
2. Preparation of derivative works based on the copyrighted material
3. Selling, renting or lending copies
4. Performing the work in public
5. Displaying the work in public
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Basically, this means you can't pick up someone else's material and pass it off as your own. To lift
another writer's words and incorporate them into your own work is plagiarism. And plagiarism is clearly
an infringement of copyright. But infringement can take other forms, as well. Even if you paraphrase
another writer's words, but use a major portion of his or her research, construction and general thought--
enough to diminish the value of that writer's work--you may be guilty of infringement.
It comes down to a ticklish question. How much can you copy or excerpt from another writer's work
without stepping across the infringement boundary? There is a hazy doctrine called "fair use." Even
without the author's permission, copyright law allows you to copy a portion of another writer's words, so
long as you do so within reason. The problem is to determine how much is within reason.
There are no hard-and-fast rules, so you have to use common sense. But a few sections of the Copyright
Law provide some guidelines that may help you determine whether you may be exceeding the limits of
fair use. For example, consider the purpose of your copying. If you are using someone else's words for
critical or educational reasons, you may have more latitude than you would for commercial purposes. At
the same time, consider the nature of the work you are copying. In theory, you can quote more safely
from a textbook or scholarly work than you can from a popular commercial work. Also, you should give
some thought to the ratio of words in relationship to the length of the copyrighted work as a whole. For
example, 200 words from a full-length book might be perfectly acceptable, but 200 words from a 300-
word article would be outrageous. With some copyrighted materials, even a fair and sane ratio won't help.
Fair use is generally not applicable to poetry, musical lyrics, and dialogue from a play, entries in a diary,
private letters, charts and graphs, author's notes or case studies.
What about crediting your source? Will that help you avoid the onus of copyright infringement? There are
two answers. The first is: Always credit your source if possible. It is simply good manners. The second
answer: No, even if you do credit your source, it won't necessarily get you off the legal hook.
Ethical guidelines
When you attempt to fashion a system of personal ethical standards, you are embarking on a climb up the
side of a self-constructed mountain, hoping for a morally acceptable view from the top. But the view is
often murky. Ethics are a very personal thing. You set the standards for yourself. Laws, even when
hammered into a confusing jumble of vague and seemingly conflicting social ideals, are meant for
everyone. But an ethical stance can be determined by only one person, the one who intends to live within
its parameters. You break the law, and you offend society. Go against your own ethical standards, and
you offend mainly yourself.
The reason for soft codes is probably obvious. Professional journalists are extremely jealous of their
freedom. To allow some outside force to set to paper clear and usable rules and insist that they be
followed would be a direct challenge. An individual newspaper or magazine or other publication might
well create a solid set of guidelines and demand that anyone accepting work and payment from that
publication must adhere to the parent organisation's rules and regulations, but few publishers would
cheerfully accept the enforcement of rigid guidelines from outside the organisation, even if the outside
source were an amenable society of like-minded individuals.
So you come back to personal ethics, and the guidelines you will choose to enforce for yourself. Others
may make suggestions. Editors may make suggestions. Your co-workers may make suggestions. But the
only person who can force you to take the high road is you. Some of your choices may be made on
moralistic grounds. Others may stem from your political or social upbringing. You may base some
choices on the expectations of the markets for which you write. You may even make some ethical
decisions for reasons of expedience, the knowledge that to do otherwise might wreck you forever with a
particular editor or set of editors. Whatever your reasons, your decisions may make the difference
between whether you are a good writer or an untrustworthy writer.
Let's take a look at some of the ethical situations you might have to face.
Truth and Accuracy
Because you are a writer of non-fiction, this is one ethical condition that has no flexibility. Journalists are
expected to report truthfully and accurately. The truth may not always be apparent, but it's your job to try
to root it out. You'll make mistakes. Everyone does. But the quickest way to lose the respect of your
editors, your peers and your audience is to falsify information deliberately.
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As a writer, you owe a debt to your sources and to the people you write about. You can't always write
nice things about people. That isn't the way reporting works. But you can at least attempt to write fairly.
If a person has good traits and bad traits and you intend to mention the bad traits, perhaps it would be
fairer if you touched on the good traits as well.
A good way to check your material for fairness is to put yourself in the position of the person about
whom you are writing. Examine your copy as though it had been written about you. Do you consider it
accurate? Is it fair? If your answer to either question is no, maybe you should reconsider and take another
look at your selection of facts.
Doctoring Quotes
Does a writer have a moral right to tamper with someone else's words? It isn't always easy to formulate
ethical guidelines, because sometimes--as with direct quotes--you'll find several distinct schools of
thought, each with its own rational foundation. Many writers consider direct quotations to be inviolate.
Such writers stick to verbatim quotes and refuse to change a single word. And they have a large
following. Other writers are willing to dress up a quote, to change the structure entirely, as long as the
essence remains the same.
Many writers aren't willing to get that far, but prefer a middle position. They might remove parenthetical
expressions or repetitions from a subject's speech, but otherwise leave the quote as it stands. And many
writers clean up a subject's accidental bad grammar, especially if it's the kind of innocent oral slip that
we all make when talking.
When a subject uses consistent bad grammar or commits amusing linguistic muffs, some writers prefer to
leave it in as revealing of character. But if it's just a slight goof, a temporary loss of syntax that has
nothing to do with character or the meaning of the quote, most writers feel duty-bound to correct it.
On and Of the Record
Most writers don't like off-the-record material. But if your source places something off-the-record and
you listen to it without objection, then you are morally committed to keep it off-the-record. That could
cause real problems if you later unearth the same information from another source. A frequently
recommended procedure for those times when someone says, "This is off-the-record," is to interrupt
immediately and tell the source in that case you'd rather not hear it. The source can then change his or her
mind and put it on-the-record, or pass on to something else. Nor should you allow anyone to make
something off-the-record retroactively. When a subject tells you something and then says, "By the way,
that was off-the-record," you shouldn't allow it to pass. If you have consistently stuck to your guns about
not accepting off-the-record status, it will now be easier for you to say, "I'm sorry. I never listen to off-
the-record material. If you intended that to be off-the-record, you should have told me sooner so I could
warn you not to say it." You may end up with some ill feelings between you and your source, but at least
you won't feel morally inept.
Made-up names and places
As a general rule, you will not make up people or places. Other writers as well have been caught with
their imaginations showing, though not usually with such publicly disastrous results.
There may be times when invented names or places or composite people will be acceptable, even
mandatory, but the key is not to try to pass them off as real. If you want to show a hypothetical average
man, or a representative average working mother or a composite of several persons, make sure it's
obvious that they're made up. The easiest way to do this is to use Ali or Eman or some variation. Or put
the name in quotes, to signal the reader that you're dealing with "hypothetical" cases. With or without
quotes, hypothetical characters should have nice, simple names. Readers will often accept hypothetical
illustrations if they deal with plain, average people, because readers realise it could happen to anyone.
Confidential Sources
If you promise anonymity and confidentiality to a source, you have a moral obligation to live up to your
side of the bargain. Confidentiality has been with us a long, long time, and it has been extremely useful.
Without it, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would never have broken a number of their important
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Watergate stories. But there may have been an erosion of trust in confidential sources. Many editors now
insist on knowing the identity of a confidential source before they will run the material that comes from it.
Suppose you have made a promise of confidentiality to a source, and your editor puts you on the spot,
demanding the name. What would you do? Live up to your agreement? Take a chance on losing your job?
Ethical crises can come in a number of forms.
Editorial Bias
While discussing the subject of interference from editors and executives in the daily reportorial process,
let's dismiss a public phantom. A number of people outside journalism seem to believe that editors and
executives go around killing stories and hiding facts that disagree with their politics or their biases. It can
happen, surely, but it's rare. Newspaper and magazine executives are usually better journalists than the
reporters they oversee (that's often how they rose to executive positions in the first place), and they are as
eager for the truth, as ready to break a story, as any writer. If you're worried about editorial influence in
your future, don't be. Most editors and executives have as high a standard of ethics as yours will ever be,
and they are not apt to influence your copy unduly. If you happen across one of the few exceptions, you
must then make an ethical choice of your own. Will you accept improper influence to protect your job?
Or will you move on to a better newspaper where such practices are not acceptable?
Pretence and deception
There will be times when you're after a story and it would be easier to get your information if you could
only pretend to be someone else. What do you do? This is another of those hazy areas that depend largely
on the circumstances and what role you wish to play. Can you pretend to be a police officer in order to
question the victim of a crime? No. Can you pretend to be a customer in order to check alleged illegal
practices at an auto inspection station? Probably. The main dividing line seems to be whether you actively
engage in deception or merely go along with pretence. If you tell someone you are an insurance salesman,
you are involved in deception--you have lied about yourself to make your position more advantageous.
On the other hand, if you attend a meeting of outraged citizens, knowing they intend to turn reporters
away, and you sit among them without paper and pencil in evidence, and they assume that you are one of
them and you allow them to continue with that assumption, have you really acted unethically? Many
people would say not. The outraged citizens might disagree, of course, once they see your story in print.
Some writers can never be comfortable in any role but the honest, obvious, straightforward presentation
of themselves as writers. Others don't mind deception if it gets good results. You must make the final
decision for yourself. And be sure your decision doesn't go against the policies of your publication.
Conflicts of interest
Newspaper and magazine writers, since they have to deal with the public day in and out, are usually
friendly people. So they make friends. Being human, they may also make enemies. If you are assigned a
story about a friend, a relative or even an enemy, you owe it to your editor and your conscience to make
that personal relationship known before you go out to cover the story. The same holds true for any
business-story assignment that involves a firm in which you hold some financial interest. You may be
perfectly capable of covering such a story objectively and writing it objectively in spite of any personal
connection, but the proper ethical position is to make sure the editor knows of your relationship in time to
reassign the story, should that be the editor's preference. After all, others may know of your personal
relationship as well, and appearances can sometimes be as damaging as actually mishandling the story.
Multiple submissions
For freelancers, a common ethical situation is whether or not to submit an idea or an article
simultaneously to more than one potential publication. The standard answer is no. Do not. Learn patience.
Send your ideas and your finished articles to one publication at a time. But there is a different stance on
this subject, which is being taken by more and more professionals in the field. It holds that editors are not
dumb, and they know that writers these days are often sending queries to several magazines at one time.
So what do you do? No one can legislate your ethics for you. You'll have to decide how to handle this
question on your own. But be aware that some editors may well be offended by the practice of multiple
queries and may not be willing to consider future article ideas if they catch you at it. On the other hand,
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maybe such unyielding editors aren't the kind you care to work with anyway. The decision is yours. As
for multiple submissions of a finished article, about the only time it is allowable is when you have a topic
that is hot, timely and important. Even then, you should notify the editors that you are making multiple
submissions.
Multiple versions
Here's another ethical situation that confronts mainly freelancers. Once you have gone to a great deal of
trouble to gather research and fresh information on a specific topic, there is always the temptation to use
your material for more than one article, giving it a fresh slant, a different construction and a whole new
set of words. Is this permissible? Generally, yes, as long as subsequent articles are submitted to markets
that are not in direct competition with the market that purchased your first version. For example, if you
worked hard to prepare a definitive article on database research and placed it with one of the leading
computer magazines, you wouldn't then turn around and rewrite the same idea for a competitive computer
magazine. Neither editor would be very happy to see the same general information appearing in the pages
of a rival magazine. However, if you sell your original version to a computer magazine, then give your
story angle a fresh twist and write a piece showing the value of database research to freelance writers and
sell it to one of the writing magazines, there should be no cause for unhappiness on the part of either
editor. You could then go on to rewrite the material for a business journal, or for a publication aimed at
librarians or scholars or historians or any other specialised magazine directed toward a non-competitive
audience of people who might benefit from your information.
Making ethical decisions
Got the idea? There are many other ethical situations that can tease your conscience: freebies, paid
junkets, personal gifts, when to use a concealed tape recorder, use of names of juvenile offenders,
breaking a story when you know it may cause injury to someone, using "leaked" information. Consult
your common sense. Anyone can tell when, for example, some minor gift from a source is only a pleasant
gesture and when it is a would-be bribe. And above all, consult both your conscience and the policy of
your newspaper or magazine.
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Table of Contents:
  1. IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE:Feature writing, Explanation of the definition
  2. SOURCES OF MATERIAL:Commemorations, Science and Technology
  3. INTERNET USAGE IN FEATURE WRITING:Be very careful, Website checklist
  4. WHAT MAKES A GOOD FEATURE?:Meeting demands of readers
  5. DEMANDS OF A FEATURE:Entertainment and Interest, Both sides of picture
  6. CONDUCTING AND WRITING OF INTERVIEWS:Kinds of interviews
  7. WRITING NOVELTY INTROS:Punch or astonisher intros, Direct quotation intros
  8. STRUCTURE OF FEATURES:Intro or Lead, Transition, Body
  9. SELECTION OF PICTURES, ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS:Sources
  10. FEATURES AND EDITORIAL POLICY:Slanting or angling feature
  11. HUMAN INTEREST AND FEATURE WRITING:Obtaining facts, Knowing how to write
  12. NEWSPAPER FEATURE STORY:The Business Story, The Medical Story
  13. THE NEWSPAPER FEATURE STORY IDEA:Conflict, Human interest
  14. MAGAZINE FEATURE VERSUS DAILIES:Feature versus Editorial, An overview
  15. WRITING THE SPECIALISED FEATURE STORY:The Deadline Feature Sidebar
  16. MODERN FEATURE AND ITS TREATMENT:Readers’ constraints
  17. MODERN FEATURE WRITING TECHNIQUE:The Blundell Technique
  18. ADVICE TO FEATURE WRITERS:A guide to better writing, Love Writing
  19. COLUMN WRITING:Definition, Various definitions, Why most powerful?
  20. COLUMN WRITING IN MODERN AGE:Diversity of thought, Individuality
  21. ENGLISH AND URDU COLUMNISTS:More of anecdotal, Letting readers know
  22. TYPES OF COLUMNS:Reporting-in-Depth Columns, Gossip Columns
  23. OBJECTIVES AND IMPORTANCE OF COLUMNS:Friendly atmosphere, Analysis
  24. WHAT ARE THE ESSENTIALS AND BASIC POINTS THAT GO IN TO THE FORMING OF A COLUMN?
  25. STYLE:General and a specialised writing, How can a columnist improve it?
  26. GENERAL STYLE OF THE COLUMN:Unified Style, Anecdotal Style, Departmental Style
  27. STRUCTURE OF A COLUMN:Intro or lead, Main body, Conclusion
  28. COLUMN WRITING TIPS:Write with conviction, Purpose, Content
  29. SELECTION OF A TOPIC:Close to your heart, Things keeping in Queue
  30. QUALITIES OF A COLUMN WRITER:Personal, Professional, Highly Educated
  31. WHAT MUST BE PRACTISED BY A COLUMNIST?:Pleasantness, Fluency
  32. SOURCES OF MATERIAL OF COLUMNS:Constant factors, Interview
  33. USEFUL WRITING DEVICES:Be specific, Use Characterisation, Describe scenes
  34. COMMON WRITING PROBLEMS:Eliminate clichés, Don’t misuse words
  35. WRITING THE COLUMN:Certain thumb rules, After writing the column
  36. ARTICLE WRITING:Introduction, Definition, Contents, Main Segments, Main body
  37. HOW TO WRITE AN ARTICLE?:It is more efficient, It is more believable
  38. TYPES AND SUBJECTS OF ARTICLE:Interview articles, Utility articles
  39. FIVE COMMANDMENTS, NO PROFESSIONAL FORGETS:Use Key Words
  40. ARTICLES WRITING MISTAKES:Plagiarising or 'buying articles, Rambling
  41. WRITING THE ARTICLE:Various parts of article, The topic sentence
  42. What to do when you have written the article?:Writing the first draft
  43. TEN STANDARD ARTICLE FORMATS:The informative articles
  44. LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR WRITERS:Libel, Doctoring Quotes
  45. REVISION:Importance of language, Feature writing, Sources of material