What do you do when you find out someone has attempted to steal your company name (the one you registered and incorporated years and years ago)?
What do you do when you see they’ve taken your slogan (“We Write to the Point”) and created a website, even one with a Flash banner?
Well, normally, you’d probably write to them and suggest that since they stole it, they “unsteal” it. In this case, the site was so poorly done, I also commented on the spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, horrible layout design, etc.
Having been in this industry for more years than I think I want to admit, I have to also say that I threw a bit of protectzia in for Ms Paramita Ghosh and her (www.writepoint.net.in) site. I told her that having been a moderator of HATT, I was friends with some of the people she plagiarized and would be in contact with them as well.
I started by posting her site to the Indian technical writers lists, asking if anyone even knew who she was. No, was the response – never heard of her, but her actions were deplorable. Yes, they were, and they get even worse!
I held out the hope that she would reconsider using/abusing my site name and would take down her site, perhaps steal someone else’s name instead. After all, it is obvious the site is relatively new (she’s quite proud to explain she put it up 8 months ago and it must be okay because no one complained about it until now).
Well, there is no end to the nerve of some people. Ms Ghosh wrote back – so far in about 3 repetitive emails from three different email addresses. Years ago, a friend wrote to me and said that if I was going to post something funny, I should warn her first. So, here goes. If you have a cup of coffee in your hand, please put it down before reading!
Ms Paramita Ghosh insists I take down MY site. She does, seriously. Are you  laughing yet? I am.
Oh, and she also wrote:
I kid you not. You can’t make this stuff up. No, Paramita Ghosh, I WILL (you missed the second l) not proof your site for you. You wrote it, you can try to fix it. But I will respond to this one:
The internet has millions of websites, registered and supported by reputed hosting companies. Most of them have factual errors, bad grammar, bad writing style, offensive content etc. If anyone
has to take my website down, then before that happens, I will have thousands of other websites
taken down including your’s. IÂ request you to take down your website by March 31!
See, the point of technical writing is to write something that is accurate and proper. The fact that others do not do so does not lessen our responsibility to properly write. If you can’t hold yourself to a higher standard…wait, who am I kidding? This is a woman who took my company name. Higher standard? Never mind.
But I will answer this one:
If I take you for “defamation” and you may be asked to take your website down!
No, I honestly can’t imagine anyone asking me to take down the WritePoint site after learning that my site has been up for more than a decade against your 8 month travesty.
But, I have made Paramita Ghosh a promise and so I will keep it. I have decided to help her publicize her site. I hope you will all go to her site…and enjoy. Anyone teaching technical writing will have a wonderful time taking examples of poor writing for their editing class. Anyone designing a website can use it as an example of what not to do. Anyone learning help authoring…no, wait, don’t – please don’t listen to anything written there! Otherwise, you might think you have to buy a multi-million dollar corporation (Adobe 8.0)!
Of particular amusement, is this page:
As an Adobe Community Professional with more than 16 years of experience using RoboHelp and more than a decade of teaching it, I have to admit, I have no idea what she is trying to say here.
WinHelp? WinHelp died about 10 years ago (officially killed in 1997, lingered for many years, but still). It’s clear she has raided the Adobe site (not correctly, but still), and clearly, she does not seem to grasp that there is no Adobe 8.0. Adobe is the company, not the product, dear Ms Paramita.
On another note, it is certainly entertaining to read her editing tips, the first of which is:
Okay, I’m laughing and appreciate her giving us such a fine example of repetitive human mistakes. And another one that is equally as telling is this one:
Well, I can’t say I’m surprised that she favors cheat sheets.
I could go on and on with this site, but I don’t really want to assist her in attempting to fix it. I will tell you that back in 1995 when considering a name for the new company we were about to start, the first thing we did was search the Internet. Our goal was to establish something that would stand the test of time. We had many ideas and dismissed several because they were taken. Any Google search instantly returns 84,100 hits for WritePoint – the first five of which are my company, WritePoint Ltd. Similarly, when you search for our slogan, “We Write to the Point”, we come up at the top. Ms Paramita Ghosh doesn’t make the top 10 pages (I got tired of looking after that).
Finally, Ms Paramita Ghosh, I have dedicated the last 16 or so years of my professional life to building WritePoint into the company it is today. As others have already told me, Ms Paramita Ghosh will only make a fool of herself by continuing to use my company name.
So long as she does, however, I will help publicize her actions – in India, in the United States and here in Israel.
You can hire Ms Paramita Ghosh for $15 – $20 per hour. But when you are done and need your documentation fixed, please call WritePoint Ltd. – the true technical documentation company that long ago proved that We Write to the Point.