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Ghostwriting is Intellectual Dishonesty
We should fight against it.
It’s everywhere and it has to stop.
If we want to preserve the arts and the sciences as realms of skill and expertise, that is.
What is Ghostwriting?
Everyone is a writer these days. Or a composer, a painter, a director, a motivational speaker, a preacher, or a fantastic science writer.
In fact, a person can be all of those things at once.
Why?
Because one no longer has to have the specific skills required by each of these fields.
Enter ghostwriting, the process where an individual or a company exploits the written work of another person and presents it publicly as their own because they’ve paid for it and now they can.
Ghosting, as a general term, is the same process applied to every imaginable area in both arts and sciences.
Want to write a book but can’t glue two given words together if your life depended on it? Hire a writer. Boom! You’re an author.
Want to be called a painter but can only doodle? No problem. Hire a professional painter, sign your name on the completed canvas, and boom, your own gallery.
Do you have to give a speech, write a thesis, a Sunday sermon even? Hire a whatever and you’ll have it, ready to slap your name on it and show the final work as your own on all social media.
It’s never been this easy… You’d be an idiot not to do it, really.
But an honest idiot though.
What’s the Catch that Makes Ghostwriting a Dishonest Practice?
The poor talented bastard that creates the work — good or bad, but still, completed — never gets credited for it.
Sure, they may change the poor thing via a nice check from the person or company that hired him or her for the job, and they may get a smaller type of recognition for some minor involvement in a project, but the main problem stays: the creator is manipulated — usually in exchange for money alone — to give up their main role regarding a piece of art or writing.
