Terms of use

These terms govern use of The Dialogue Lab, published by Stewart Ferris. If you do not agree, don’t use the site. Questions: [email protected].

The guides

Articles, examples, and tools are educational. They are not legal advice, not a script coverage report, and not a promise that a contest, publisher, or producer will respond to your pages. You are responsible for your own drafts, contracts, and quotations. See the disclaimer.

Intellectual property

The original text, design, and teaching examples on this site belong to the publisher or are used under a right we hold. You may quote a short passage with a link and attribution for criticism, teaching, or review. You may not copy articles wholesale, republish the workbook as your own, or train a public model on the site by scraping it. Your drafts remain yours. Pasting them into a tool does not give us a licence, because we never receive them.

The Dialogue Clinic and the library

If you email a passage for the clinic or the example library, you confirm that you have the right to submit it, that it is not a copy of someone else’s published work, and that it does not expose a private person’s words without a basis for doing so. You grant the Lab a non-exclusive licence to edit, quote, and publish an anonymised version for criticism and teaching. You keep your copyright. We may decline, cut, or never run a submission. Do not send material you cannot afford to see discussed. Local “queue” buttons in the browser are receipts on your device, not a filing system we control.

Acceptable use

Don’t attack the site, probe it for other people’s data, or use the comment boxes to post anyone’s private information. Don’t submit illegal content. We may remove material and block obvious abuse.

Liability

The site is provided as-is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost drafts, missed deadlines, contest fees, or decisions you make after reading a guide or trusting a tool’s heuristic. The tools are wrong sometimes; the articles say so. Nothing excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, without prejudice to rights you have as a consumer where you live that cannot be waived. Updated 21 October 2026.