Word Forward

Copyright is different to copywriting which is the writing of ‘copy’, usually advertisements or press releases.

Copyright is the legal right to protect work you create and to control who can copy it. The digital age has made it easier than ever to copy material. But unless you created it, you don’t

own it. All work is copyrighted whether the © is included or not.

There are various tracking mechanisms available to authors for ensuring their work is not plagiarised, such as www.copyscape.com

For a brief overview of copyright, check out this page from Cleardocs.

Q: “Quick question – proofreading is definitely one word isn’t it? My mum was adamant it is 2 words or at least hyphenated.”

A: Your mum’s not wrong. Like a lot of spelling and grammar it’s a matter of personal preference and locality. Originally (1930s) the term was proof read and then became hyphenated (proof-read) as per my 1963 Newnes family dictionary. In a process of natural evolution it has since been compounded to become one word. Is your mum British? Proof-read tends to be more popular in British-English. American-English prefers proofread. The Oxford Concise Dictionary, Cambridge University Press and the Collins English dictionary lists it as proofread but the Random House dictionary has it currently as proof-read.

The compound word is significantly more popular on the internet. A Google search will return 558,000 results for proof-read/proof read and 2,540,000 for proofread and that’s my basis for using it even though I was taught proof-read at school.

Hope that helps and please thank your mum for giving me a blog post idea.