Avoiding minor plagiarism is an occupational hazard of writing. There are only so many ways to say "Trichet told a press conference that monetary policy would continue to be tight for the rest of the year"; if you weren't at the press conference, you're going to end up using some close variant on a phrase that probably appeared in half the copy filed about it. To whom do you attribute it, if anyone?
This, however, is not minor, and also, not hard to avoid. I've very much enjoyed some of Joseph James Twitchell's work, and now it's clear why; he stole large chunks of it from some of my favorite writers, like Virginia Postrel and Grant McCracken.
I'm really not very sympathetic to writers who do this, and then claim that their note-taking was somehow at fault. I can recognize my own writing from 100 yards away, even if I don't remember having written it--when I go through my old blog, I don't need to look at the author line to discern which was written by Mindles, which by me. Indeed, writing style is so consistent that I can finish long-forgotten passages in my head before I've read to the end. I find it very, very hard to believe that Steven Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and now James Twitchell read these passages in their notes and then thought that they had written them. It's plausible to me that a particularly vivid phrase might occur to you as if you had coined it. It is not plausible to me that you accidentally remembered several paragraphs of someone else's work.
This sort of thing is particularly sad because Twitchell has written some vivid and interesting work--I particularly remember his descriptions of taking his wife and daughter shopping at luxury stores. It's not that he can't write; he chose not to.
Update Nick Gillespie's thoughts are, as always, well worth reading.
Update II Broader thoughts on plagiarism from Glenn Reynolds.
Update III James, not Joseph. Joseph Twichell was Mark Twain's close friend.
Megan, you're a hack and a fool.
Oops. Sorry, it just seemed weird to read a post of yours without pages of steaming vitriol below, so I figured I'd add some.
I will never understand why writers choose to go this route. If you can't make the deadlines, just mail it in (figuratively speaking). Even great writers aren't "on" all the time. I've read stinkers from my favorite writers before; the thing about boring writing is that the reader tends to forget it quickly or not even finish it, so it takes multiple subpar pieces before the writer is really endangering his or her reputation.
Better that than attempting plagiarism in the Internet age.
Funny, I've never thought much about being able to recognize my own writing at 100 paces, since I often can't. Sometimes I think I've written something and it was actually someone else. But I've worked primarily in the business of translating for years and years, so I guess some of that trade's terminal pathologies have already taken a bite out of my gray matter...
I do agree, however, that professors should be held to higher standards when it comes to plagiarism.
Dear Ms. McCardle: You call him "Joseph" Twitchell twice, but everyone else is calling him James or Jim. A small matter, but you've already tripped up Glenn Reynolds.
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
I am by no means a defender of plagarism, but I will say this - I often review something I wrote five or six years ago, and it is like seeing it for the first time.
Having said that, I still don't think I've ever read someone else, and thought it was my work.
I took a class or two from Ambrose at UNO, and found him extremely full of himself. After the plagarism charges came to light, I can say I was not particularly surprised, though disappointed.
Marcus
"If you can't make the deadlines, just mail it in..."
Or just put the darn passage in quotes with proper attribution. I wonder whether these plagiarists are just so insecure about their own writing ability that they can't bear to give credit to someone else for a particularly well-written passage. Or they're so concerned with their need to appear brilliant and original that they can't give someone else credit for a new idea (e.g., the Diderot Effect).
I was called a plagiarist for quoting an important paragraph from a book I cited, and bolding a really outrageous sentence. Someone else, gasp, did the same thing!
you be the judge
response [2]
Megan-I think you meant to say that committing minor plagiarism is an occuptional hazard for writers. Avoiding the hazard is what writers hope to do. I enjoy your columns overall and, alas, have no vitriol to share.
As strange as this case is, I am tempted to ascribe it to an extremely muddled mind rather than blatant public dishonesty. Perhaps not EVERYBODY recognizes their style as easily as Megan does. Or perhaps he was improperly using his army of undead slaves to ghostwrite for him, and the plagiarism was actually a second-order effect, the pitfall of using a dishonest grad student.
The Glenn Reynolds paper starts off with an example that baffles me. Apparently one university copied the section on plagiarism from another university's TA handbook. There was a similar case not long ago involving a university copying its honor code from another school. Why is this even a concern in these cases?
TA handbooks and honor codes are policy documents. Unlike, say, a newspaper article or a scholarly work, they make no claim to originality, since the intent of those documents is not to communicate original ideas. The intent of policy documents is to articulate a set of rules, and in that case tried-and-true would seem to be preferable to originality. If the intent of one university is to make their policy the same as another university's (having observed, perhaps, that the other university's policy has been particularly successful), then why shouldn't they copy it verbatim? Rewording it solely for the sake of originality serves no valuable purpose, and it risks introducing loopholes or other bugs in the rules the policy is intended to promulgate.
I am not in any way advocating plagiarism in works intended to communicate original ideas (as for example might be the case if we were talking about an op-ed about plagiarism policy), but extending the same standard of originality to policy documents seems absurd. What purpose is served by doing so?
This phenomenon amazes me. Not the plagiarizing one but the one where the author genuinely believes they wrote it themselves. This happens to me sometimes in conversation. To an outside observer I'll appear to have lost an argument to a blustering blowhard dead set against allowing a fresh thought that runs counter to their internal narrative. Then later, sometimes months later, the subject comes up again, and I'll think, "Well, here we go again," and I'll recognize my own thought expressed in my own language with the vocabulary I contrived on the spot to drive the point. All this without attribution, or any recognition at all as to authorship outside the mind of my interlocutor. At first I found this infuriatingly frustrating. Now I'm merely please I do manage to have some measure of influence if not ever recognition. It used to happen with my younger brother a lot during his philosophical formative years.
Recently I wrote an email to another guy expressing my opinion about the Bible. It contained an unusual idea and a perfectly unique and sympathetic sentence. It the return email, the response contained that exact sentence, the one I was privately proud of having put together, just as if the return writer had originated it. In that moment of reading it I thought, "Well, there that is." Then his next sentence had me thoroughly confused; "I do believe that's the smartest sentence I ever wrote." *realigns dropped jaw* O RLY? You dumb ass, I wrote it! But then I thought, "OK, fine. Whatever."
In other incidences the roles of an entire episode are reversed. You, the perpetrator, and me, the long-suffering victim, are completely reversed in the retelling. It's infuriating. The only conclusion here is that I'm dealing with a total schizophrenic.
But this copying of entire paragraphs is indefensible. It is, after all, the cardinal sin of publishing. And in this age of cached pages, what can they be thinking? What's so hard about saying, "I read something here that has influenced my thinking greatly" ?
I think plagiarism will continue to be a problem for a long time. In fifth grade, my daughter's class does much of their research on the internet where it is easy to cut and paste--and the teacher makes no effort to insist that students use their own words. This doesn't explain Twitchell, Ambrose, et al, because they didn't learn to cut and paste in fifth grade. My point is that this problem will get worse.
With all of the editorial revisions that professional writing goes through, at what point does it stop being the work of the original author? Or, if you work for an institution with a strict editorial style, such as the Economist, are the words typed even yours? (I'm ignoring copyright and works made for hire)
Fix the "This" link, please?
I'm with Megan on the phenomenon of recognizing my own writing. I have on occasion contributed passages to larger works (in a context where the absence of attribution was appropriate). I sometime years later re-read these and have on several occasions wondered if a particular passage was mine. The times I have followed up to find out, they were.
But it is also true that this may legitimately not be a universal phenomenon. Perhaps there are writers who really don't recognize their own writing. This still does justify the "sloppy note taking" defense. What sort of note-taking system would produce this result?
I'm sure this could be done: a file intermingling the writer's thoughts with copied text, without taking care to attribute the copied text or distinguish it from the original bits. But why would any sensible person create such a bad system? It is a variant of the "I'm not evil: I'm incompetent" defense.
Speaking of cutting and pasting, have you spent much time reading Wikipedia? That is cut and paste central. I've researched topics covering a wide variety of subjects and when I read Wiki and some other internet source I'm flabbergasted at the amount of plagaism that infests "the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet".
You mistyped the link to the article in the Gainesville Sun (anchor text "this"). The correct URL is
www.gainesville.com/article/20080426/NEWS/757517854/1002/NEWS
By JACK STRIPLING
Sun staff writer
Published: Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 6:01 a.m.
a. You are assuming that the person in question is sensible. This is not necessarily an appropriate assumption, indeed I am inclined to say that only a minority of the population are sensible, and I'm not one of them.
b. A person might well create such a file because they were noting down things that were interesting and were busy thinking about the ideas that were being sparked off rather than proper attribution. I know I do this myself a lot, and am slowly training myself to keep better notes, but it's a slow process.
I took a class in high school on the proper way to write a term paper. While home computing was getting more popular, it was by no means universal; we learned how to write and attribute our quotations on index cards, to be pulled out as necessary.
That class is actually the last time I used index cards, since it became immediately apparent to me that I could start a paper by writing down notes with attribution in a word processor file— footnotes, endnotes, or internal notes as required by the teacher. Then all I had to do was write and move the quotation into the appropriate location.
Nobody told me to do it that way. It just seemed to be the easiest way to keep my quotations straight. And these days, as happens all too often with my internet reading, if I am repeating something that I read somewhere but have forgotten where, I start it off with, "I saw somewhere..." Not too hard. It makes you sound vague but at least people know it's repeating, not originating.
Apparently that's beyond some professors.