Open Book Society Staff Member Angie Speaks Out on Plagiarism

You’ve got a paper due in a few hours and you’re crunched for time. You’ve GOT to get an ‘A’ or your GPA is blown. You run to the old reliable Internet and Google “Christian meanings + The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe.” You pick an article that was written in 1978 and PDFd onto some ancient listserve that you found on page 20 of your google search. You Copy/Paste a couple paragraphs. You change the order of the words in a few of the sentences… use a couple of synonyms… your teacher is NEVER going to find this article in a million years. No harm no foul, right? Wrong.

You, my friend have just committed the crime of plagiarism.  And it’s a serious crime. In some universities it means an automatic F in the class and possible academic probation. But this isn’t enough of a deterrent to keep kids from doing it every day.

This week I was a “victim” of this crime.  A young girl who runs a book review blog, took one of my reviews from OpenBookSociety and used it as her own work. When confronted with this, she denied that she had done anything wrong. She said that since she and I had both read the same book, it was only natural that we’d have the same information to report.

Yes… and no.  Two people can have the same experience but describe it completely differently. In this case, she and I seemed to have exactly ELEVEN SENTENCES that were verbatim identical. (including 2 misspelled words) Coincidence? Not likely. I requested that she apologize to me publicly on her blog. And she did. That took a lot of courage. So I thank her. She also included a link to our site. And for that, I thank her as well.

What disturbs me more than the fact that my ideas and work were stolen though, is that I’m not sure that she understands what plagiarism is. I wasn’t entirely sure of the technical definition, so I looked it up at dictionary.com

plagiarism ~  the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work, as by not crediting the author

Even if you take the words and rearrange them, use only a sentence or two, or replace a few words with your own word choices you are still plagiarizing  unless you give credit to the original author for that work by citing him or her in a bibliography or using quotations and the author’s name.

Please keep this in mind next time you write a paper, turn in a book report or just review a book!
Let’s play nice!