Oh no! It’s the grammar police!

Now I promise I won't be too hard on anyone. I was an English Literature major in college and you might think we are all members of the grammar police.
In fact I really don’t follow most grammar rules and I probably make mistakes more than a lot of you out there. What I wanted to do was bring awareness to properly citing your sources. I noticed after being here for a short period of time many bloggers out there simply don’t say where they got their information from. On top of that sometimes it’s not even clear whether what they are saying is original material or something they copied and pasted off a website somewhere else. I don’t know if you realize this or not but it is easy to check if you are plagiarizing a source. All you have to do is copy and paste a section and then Google it to see where it came from. If it doesn’t turn up as coming from here then watch out! You are probably not intentionally doing this and might not even be aware that it’s a bad thing. but trust me it is!

Properly citing your sources is more than just extra work for you. Not only does it let the reader of your blog verify that indeed so and so said this, it also lets them see if your source is credible or not. What does credibility have to do with a source? Well just because you found it on the internet and Britney Spears says its true doesn’t necessarily make it so. When you cite an outside source most people prefer that it comes from somewhere that is trusted or reliable. This can mean a person as well, but you have to be careful who your reader is. I personally am not a fan of Rush Limbaugh and if you were to be quoting him every third sentence I probably would quit reading after a very short time.

Why is that?

Bias. Bias can have an effect on your reader as well. How bias works ( and yes everyone and everything is biased no matter what you have heard) is a whole other subject I will try to tackle later, but long story short just be careful who you are quoting because you might unintentionally be leaving certain readers behind.

(Selling Real Estate)

Pictures

The same can be said of pictures. If you borrow a picture from another site it was being used in the context of that site. When you copy and paste it (with permission I hope!) you are taking it out of context and changing the overall meaning of the picture. For instance if I am talking about real estate and then take a picture from somewhere else showing the image of a family and put that in a blog and put the caption Buyers. It can be assumed by the reader of the blog that this family is currently looking to buy a home. Are they? What if I found this image somewhere else that was talking about something completely different? I hope you can see why this is important. Images say a lot and sometimes they say nothing. Putting words into your reader’s mouth can have disastrous consequences if you are not careful and think before you publish something. Again if you are using a picture you should include what the picture is about and where it was originally found. If it is free to use and is just general stock photography then fine. Use it as long as you have permission and you are doing it right. But don’t just put pictures in your posts and then assume there is no message behind the picture. You never know what your reader will think of your pictures.

Anyways back to MLA. What is MLA and what does that have to do with MLS?

MLA is the Modern Language Association. It has nothing to do with MLS but it seems like it should have a lot to do with Active Rain and blogging in general. MLA is one of two commonly accepted forms of citation. It has to do with a whole lot more than that so please if you want to learn more check out their site. I wont go into detail on how to properly cite using the MLA format but you can go here for more information. I had to put a nice plug in for my Alma Mater. For the most part you should be using MLA citation in your blogs. Even if you don’t follow it to the letter if you are at least saying where you found the material, who said it, and why it’s important to your post then you should be ok. But hey, I have to try right?

I am not trying to say what you are doing is wrong. I am not forcing you to clean up your blogs. I am saying that maybe you should think about it though because trust me, it does have a huge impact.

If you liked what I said please feel free to comment. If you like what I say a lot then please subscribe to my blog!

Thank You

Shane O'Gorman      "Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!"

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