In the past week I’ve received quite a few heartwarming essays, poems, and stories that were posted or sent around as “Author Unknown” or “Anonymous”.
However, in my very first search, and in the top 10 results for that search, I found the author for each writing!
Please don’t forward or repost writings as “author unknown” until you first try to see if you can determine the author. Here’s how to do it:
1) Look for a phrase (about 6-10 words) that stands out as being unique – something you are unlikely to write in daily writing. In today’s poem, I chose the final two lines of the poem: The therapy you really need Is out there eating hay!.
2) Go to Google and put the phrase in the search box – and be sure you surround it with quotes so Google searches it as a phrase (this is important).
3) In the results list, give a quick scan over the summaries, and look for any newsletters or pdfs – these are the links most likely to contain the author’s name.
4) Also look to see if there is any indication for a date – if so look at the oldest links first.
5) When you find the author, please tell whoever posted or sent it along to you as “author unknown” or “anonymous” that you found who wrote it, and could they please post or send again to everyone to tell them so it doesn’t keep getting passed on without attribution. For bonus kudos, you can also email to any of the other sites you found in your search that listed it as “author unknown” or “anonymous” that you found the author, and they should at least update their site with the correct authorship.
6) You can also point them to this page so they know how to search themselves, the next time they find a great essay, poem, or story they want to pass on.
Here’s a link to the entire poem, with the author’s attribution.
Now, we come to the next problem. Really, you shouldn’t be posting or sending these around at all unless you have the author’s permission. You violate copyright laws if you post or email someone else’s work (writings, photos, etc.) without their permission. If you find the author’s own website (which often happens), you should email the author and ask if it’s OK to post or email their work, and you definitely need to ask permission before you reprint it in your newsletter. There is an exception to this rule for “Fair Use” but most cases of forwarding or posting an entire essay, poem, or story do not fall under the “Fair Use” exception.