Do You Sound Like a Duck or a Quack?

I know you have heard this phrase before, but I must ask you a question...

Do you quack like a duck?

Or more to the point...

Do other people think you sound like a quack?

Most often, when people think of Quacks, they are talking about Quack medical advice... And that is how I got thinking about this...

When you go to Google and search for any keyword phrase, it is likely that you are going to get anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of results back from Google...

When I worked as a ghost writer, I tended to avoid writing in the medical field, because I would not know really which information was sound advice and which information was not...

If I sourced the wrong information for the advice I offered in an article, I could have been contributing to the illness or death of people reading the information I presented to them in article format...

I am not a doctor, so I was not able to judge the value of the information. If I were to do ghost writing on medical topics, I could only judge the character of the websites I sourced for information, which would mean that I would spend most of my research time on government operated websites like the Center for Disease Control, etc.

When the information you present matters to people, are you seen as a Quack?

When you write forum posts, articles, blog posts, or any online content, do you take care to make sure that you are telling people information based in fact?

Or are you sharing information that you have heard, but have never yourself tested to be true?

It does not matter how fervently you believe the information to be true... Have you tested the information yourself, or are you trusting what you have read somewhere else?

LOL

Consider this...

If you are sharing information based on what you have read, that does not always make you wrong...

When you share the information that you read, you must trust that the people who told you the information had it right too...

How strongly do you trust the source from whom you took the information?

If you quote your source verbatim, it is assumed that you find your source to have been very credible...

But in the face of contrary testimony, what position do you take?

Do you dig in your heels? Or, do you strive to get the facts based on your experience?

At the end of the day, many people will take your words as a representation of your credibility...

So it is important to understand whether people judge your words credible or whether they judge you by your words to be a quack...

When you quack, do you quack like a duck or sound like a quack?

This is not designed as a rhetorical question, but an opportunity for us to understand how to get to the truth of what we read...

How do you determine the credibility or what you read, and therefore, how do you determine the credibility of what you are willing to write?