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Illustration from Canterbury Tales

A Note to Students and the General Public

If you are a student—any sort of student, at any school anywhere—and you are working on an assignment, you are welcome to read and study the materials at any of my web sites. What you cannot do is plagiarize. If you have any doubts about what plagiarism is, ask your teacher.

I am forced to post this warning because far too many students, mostly middle school and high school students, are lifting parts of my essays and are trying to pass them off as their own work. This is intellectually dishonest and I will gladly assist any teacher in tracking down instances of plagiarism involving my sites.

General Public

Anyone is welcome to read and study the materials at this site. I ask, however, that you not duplicate any of my materials. I do not want mirror sites and I do not want individual essays reproduced in any form elsewhere. I ask this because I revise essays from time to time, either to reflect changes in my own thinking or to correct factual mistakes. If material is copied elsewhere, that older copy will not reflect the changes. You are welcome to make all the links you wish, but no portion of my writings may be duplicated without my explicit consent.

How to Cite this Site

Use the standard form taught to you by your teacher. The format is unimportant, in my opinion; what counts is the content. Your citation must provide a direct, clickable link to the exact page where you read the information you are citing. There's no point in providing a link to the home page of the site itself, for that's like citing a book without a page number. Don't make your reader have to hunt.

What Year?

I get this question regularly. What year did I write this? The question doesn't make much sense for a website. A book gets published and never changes. If there's any revision at all, there's usually a lot of revisions and it gets re-published as a second edition. Websites don't work that way, of course. I revise pages constantly.

But if you have to have a year to satisfy your teacher, use 1994. That's when this course first went online, although it has changed drastically over the years. Or, if you prefer, use the current year. Chances are I made a change somewhere around here this year.

If you have questions or comments about any aspect of the site, please read my inquiry page first.