Author: Patricia J. Parsons

Reading, writing & publishing. Doing things differently.
Posted in Backstory, Writing

Mining the wisdom of the ‘crone’

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

Senior woman contemplatingCrone.  What an awful word.  And yet I’ve been thinking about her this week, and how I might tap into my own inner crone to see if she has any wisdom that might inform both my writing and my day job these days.

Some definitions of the word suggest that it refers to an old woman who is ugly, thin, withered, cranky.  Wikipedia’s entry on the crone says she’s “…disagreeable, malicious, or sinister…”—a  folkloric character.  But it also suggests that crones are magical, and that they are the archetypical wise woman.

Some years ago I spent a lot of time reading and listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estes (who famously wrote Women Who Run with Wolves) and her stories about the archetypal crone, or as she sees her, the wise old woman.  She conceptualized the three stages of a woman’s life as maiden, mother, crone, implying that if we live long enough, we’ll all enter that final stage.  The crone.  But Dr. Estes doesn’t see it as so bad.  In fact, listening to her tell stories about crones often made me look forward to the day when some of the following might be a part of my life.

  • Not caring what anyone else thinks about what I do…
  • …but tempering that lack of care with the wisdom to know when not to hurt others…
  • …coupled with the accumulated years of decisions, choices, and knowledge that when mixed together and applied judiciously result in wisdom.

And so, I’m thinking about how much wisdom I might have accumulated at this point in my life.  Do I have enough wisdom to be able to stand back and let my younger colleagues make their own mistakes, to let them take the view that older is not better, to let them believe that their considerable erudition is a match for wisdom?  Do I have enough wisdom to apply it to my writing?  Can I mine those choices, that knowledge (of myself and others), those decisions?

The website Crones Counsel says this about the crone:  “Crone women fly directly into the face of ageism and sexism. They refuse to be put down. They do not walk meekly on the road to old age. They are keen to assert their presence if not their influence.”[1]

I guess the part of this that I have had the most difficulty with in recent years is asserting presence without asserting influence.  I’m not sure what happened this week, but I seem to have had an epiphany.  I seem to no longer feel the need to influence external factors.  Perhaps that will serve me well in my interior life where my writing lives before it gets out onto the page /computer screen.

Crones Counsel also says: “…a Crone is an older woman who has learned to walk in her own truth, in her own way, having gained her strength by acknowledging the power and wisdom of the totality of her experience. She is “a wise old woman.”[2]

I’m going to do as they suggest and celebrate the place I am in my life.  It’s time to let go of a few things so that I can embrace my own truth.

Posted in Professional Associations

The Canadian Public Relations Society and its Canadian PR Idol Contest

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

About a month ago, I responded to a call for proposals for presentations/workshops/panels for the 2013 meeting of the Canadian Public Relations Society.  The title of my presentation is: Did you really say that? The truth about bulls**t and PR.  Here is what I submitted:

The first edition of my ethics book which is more popular in Europe than in North America. Wonder why...
The first edition of my ethics book which is more popular in Europe than in North America. Wonder why…

When Prof. Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosophy professor published his essay “On Bullshit” in 1986, he started a discussion that could only be interpreted as a serious indictment of the ‘truthfulness’ or lack thereof of our field. This presentation will “inspire participants to challenge norms and live beyond the status quo” by understanding what constitutes BS and how PR messaging can avoid contributing to it. Together we will explore the definition of BS and examine instances of BS in PR & marketing campaigns in Canada. It is only through an ethical lens that we can begin to reframe the conversation.

I opened my email this evening to discover correspondence from one of the conference organizers.  Here is what it said, “Thank you for submitting a presentation abstract for the Canadian Public Relations Society’s conference Conversations 2013. Your submission has made it to the next round of review, where we will be asking for the communications community to vote on the sessions they are most interested in seeing at next year’s event. ..”

I read it again.  I shook my head, and the feeling of being professionally insulted started making its way up the back of my neck.  A professional organization is holding a popularity contest to determine what presentations ought to be on the conference agenda?  Well, what a creative idea.  Voting will begin on Friday.

Here is what I said to the conference organizers:

I can appreciate the desire to take a creative approach to planning a conference, however, I did not sign up to be part of “Canadian PR Idol.”  At this point in my career I have no desire to be part of a popularity contest.  My submission was genuine and submitted with integrity.  I had hoped that selections would be made in kind. 

Clearly transparency and its ethical underpinnings are not part of the CPRS conference mandate.  If this information was on the call for proposals, I seem to have missed it. It seems that my take on PR and BS was right on the money.

I thus withdraw my submission…”

Public relations as a field has been the butt of many a joke about its methods and its ethics for a very long time.  As I wrote in my 2009 book Ethics in Public Relations: A Guide to Best Practice (London: Kogan Page), “There is little doubt that, even today, public relations as an industry still suffers from a bad reputation. Consider journalism professor Stuart Ewen’s 1996 book PR! A Social History of Spin, where he describes what he calls a ‘foundational conceit’ in the field of public relations – conceit born of the notion that the public mind can and should be manipulated…”  Well it seems to me that having a popularity contest to select presentations at the annual conference smacks of this conceit because I can assure you that the popular offerings will not be about ethics.  What they’ll be about his year depends on the trend-du-jour.  Whenever I speak at CPRS about ethics, as I have on many occasions before, the same people are always in the room.  I am constantly preaching to the choir.

I thought that the professional association to which I have belonged for many years was supposed to set the highest standards of practice – I thought that the professional association was supposed to concern itself with what the members of its profession need to learn about – rather than what they want to learn about.  I thought that this professional association might take seriously its responsibility to evaluate proposals and accept the best of them (whether or not mine would be counted among those is immaterial: at least the process would have been professional, and I would have been convinced that some set of quality criteria were being applied to the selections rather than the results of popular vote).  I guess I thought wrong.

But make no mistake; most of the submitters will like this approach.  After all, who can argue with the popularity of the competition where the public gets a say in the results regardless of any measure of objective quality?

It’s clearly time for me to retire.  Time to stop talking about ethics, writing about ethics, teaching about ethics.  As far as I can see, it’s pretty much a lost cause.

[Apologies to my subscribers who tune in to read about my writing – this is only peripherally connected, but I had to get it off my chest.]

Posted in Plagiarism, Writing

Plagiarism—The scourge of the writer… Part 2: Self-Plagiarism

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

My foray into academia began when I was hired almost 25 years ago to teach a writing course to undergraduates in public relations & corporate communication in a 4-year degree program (at the university where I still teach).  The mantra that I taught – and that I continue to believe in – recycle your research.  You never know when you’ll be able to re-package material for a different audience, in a different genre, with a different purpose.  Is that self-plagiarism?  Well, let’s examine it.

After my first post on plagiarism, one of my former students posted on my Facebook page that she had been taught in university the perils of plagiarism, and now that she was out in the work world, she suggested that she was expected do so on a relatively regular basis.  I wondered whether or not she was really defining plagiarism accurately, or perhaps there was a different crime that needed consideration (the notion of making up quotes in media releases is a topic for another time).  Indeed, we consider it plagiarism at the university when a student recycles a paper from one course with a few changes into another.

Last month, a University of Toronto researcher made news when he was censured for self-plagiarizing passages of text from his previously published work.  The retraction notice published on the journal’s web site says the following about the paper:

One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any material should be appropriately cited and quoted. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system.[1]

So the lesson here is that if you are going to use verbatim passages from previous work they should be appropriately attributed just as you would attribute material from sources that you did not produce yourself.  Whew!  I’m glad to have that out of the way.  From time to time I have referred to my previous work, but always with a citation.  I always thought I was just being egotistical.  Evidently I was being ethical.

So, once we have that approach to self-plagiarism out of the way – where it is clear that material is directly removed from one piece into another – is there, in fact, a grey area through which we must draw a black line?  Precisely when are we wading into the quagmire of moral turpitude?

Jonathan Bailey writing online in Plagiarism Today calls it ‘double-dipping’ and offers five scenarios where we might consider the concept of self-plagiarism and its ethics.  He offers the scenarios for consideration and asks the question of where to draw the boundaries.

One of the commenters on his site suggests that self-plagiarism is an oxymoron.  This is a perspective that needs consideration since by definition, plagiarism usually refers taking material or ideas that belong to someone else and passing them off as your own.  If it’s your own to begin with, then can it be plagiarism?

Well, strictly speaking, self-plagiarism is different from plagiarism by definition.  Self-plagiarism in practice means passing off your own previous work as if it were new and original to the situation.  So, if we accept this as the definition of self-plagiarism, then we have to accept that when new and original work is expected, it is not okay to use what you’ve written previously.  But in my mind that doesn’t preclude you from reusing your research.  And ethically, I believe that this is where that black line has to be drawn.

Reusing research that you’ve used before – even using your own writing as a reference – seems to be completely acceptable.  However, writing what is supposed to be – and is understood by your readers to be – an original piece (whether it’s for a magazine, a newspaper, a blog, an academic journal or a book) without referencing material that was actually written previously is in my view lying.  You are essentially passing it off as original when it clearly isn’t.  If someone is paying you for original work (payment might not be in money as in the case of academic writing – rather it is for recognition of a sort), then original work he or she should have.

But what about when you’re not being paid?  Like right now – I’m writing this but no one is paying me to do so.  Do you, as the reader care?  Do you expect it to be new and original?  If I write a post about self-plagiarism for someone else’s blog, the owner of that blog will tell me if he or she wants original work.  If I reuse something I’ve blogged before, I would be lying.  It would also be lying if I wrote it somewhere else before – like a magazine article – and passed it off as original material for the host blog.

It seems to me that the bottom line is to do what you say you’ll do:  if you say you’ll produce original material, then original it ought to be.  If the journal expects original material, then original material they ought to receive.  If you need to reuse some of your old writing, then cite it!

But of course, that’s just me!