Writers who ought to know better

I was shocked to read that the well-known columnist Maureen Dowd recently was caught plagiarizing. Not only that, but the paragraph she lifted was the work of a really high-profile blogger!

She claims that she heard the line from a friend, and didn't realize that her friend was just repeating something she'd read. I'm not sure that I buy that, but in any case, wasn't she still trying to pass off someone else's words as her own? Does it matter if she thought they were her friend's words, rather than another writer's?

Even more laughable, the article referred to the plagiarism as an "error." Ha! Really, a writer like Maureen Dowd ought to know better than to make an "error" like that!

Muddling plagiarism up with lies

Thanks to WritersWeekly, I found this article about a plagiarized Christmas essay:

Christmas Essay Was Not His, Author Admits

To make a long story short, Neale Donald Walsch took an essay first published by Candy Chand ten years ago, and reprinted it almost word for word, claiming it as his own work.

What is especially surprising about this is that the essay is a personal story — about an event in Chand's life. The event never even happened to Walsch, yet for years he has been telling the story as if it were his own. He claims that somewhere along the way, his mind "played a trick" on him and made him think it actually did happen to him.

Which doesn't at all explain why his essay was virtually identical to Chand's. Unless he wants us to believe that he accidentally memorized someone else's work, word for word, while still thinking it was his life the author was writing about.

Wake up and smell the copyright infringement! Seems to me Walsch probably figured that with the story circulating on the Internet, often with no attribution, and being about ten years old, no one would question it if he claimed it as his own.

The most surprising part about this is... Walsch is a Christian writer! Chand said it best when she noted the irony, in her quote at the end of the article:

“Has the man who writes best-selling books about his ‘Conversations With God’ also heard God’s commandments? ‘Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property’?”

I think we all know what Walsch's next conversation with God will be like...

Plagiarism Plagues Potter

I saw this headline today on NPR: J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, is suing over a Potter encyclopedia that is supposed to come out later this year. She says the encyclopedia sounds too much like her own words and doesn't contribute anything new, making it more or less just a rehashing of her books.

The story makes a big deal of how much of a fan the author of the encyclopedia is, but I agree with J.K. Rowling's spokesman: Fan worship doesn't excuse copyright infringement.

Using plagiarism to ban plagiarism

This is rich: Apparently, a bunch of students at a school in San Antonio got together to write an honor code discouraging cheating and plagiarism... except they copied the wording of another school's code.

Their anti-plagiarism code is plagiarized.

In the words of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe's Professor Kirke, "What do they teach in school these days?"

Extinction, sex, and plagiarism

This has to be the weirdest instance of plagiarism that I've ever heard of.

I spotted this headline on NPR: "Ferret Article Allegedly Plagiarized in Romance Lit." Who wouldn't click?

Anyway, evidently the work of nature writer Paul Tolme has been spotted in the latest book by Cassie Edwards, a long-time writer of Native American romance. This was discovered by Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, a blog that reviews, well, trashy books.

The NPR story focuses on the plagiarism of Tolme's work, which he says is inserted nearly word-for-word as dialogue after the hero and heroine have *ahem* made love for the first time. The reviewers at SBWLTB (there's no way I'm typing the full blog title every time) noticed that the dialogue seemed rather stiff and scientific, which led them to discover the plagiarized source: an article Tolme wrote about black-footed ferrets.

Although the NPR story doesn't go into it, SBWLTB says that they perused four Cassie Edwards novels, finding lifted passages in all of them. The Wikipedia page on Cassie Edwards reads:

Her publisher, Signet, initially stated that they believed the passages were used under fair use and would not be considered copyright infringement. Two days later, however, Signet announced that they would be reviewing all of Edwards' books that they published to determine whether plagiarism had occurred. In an interview, Edwards said that she did not know she was supposed to credit sources, and her husband stated that Edwards gained ideas from her reference works but did not "lift passages".

Tolme says in the NPR interview, "Cut-and-paste plagiarism is pretty rampant, from what I hear, in colleges and high schools these days. It's a phenomenon of the Internet age." The problem with that analysis is that Cassie Edwards isn't some green college student, as in other recent plagiarism cases. Edwards has been writing romance novels since 1982; in other words, she ought to know better, at least in my opinion. Yet "she did not know she was supposed to credit sources"? How the #&$! does any writer get away with not knowing that?!

I actually read quite a few of her books when I first discovered the genre, back in middle school. (And yes, for the record, they definitely qualify as trashy books.) Now I'm regretting every one that I ever bought (at the tender age of 13), and wondering how much stolen content I feasted my eyes on.

Tolme is taking the entire thing graciously, to say the least. He claims he's not even angry, and seems more intent in using this opportunity to spread the word about the black-footed ferret's plight. (And he's not kidding — several minutes of that interview are filled with him discussing ferrets.)

I don't disagree with Tolme's motives. Educating the public about endangered species is important. However, so is integrity in writers.

What constitutes plagiarism?

Occasionally I run across job ads where the client wants writers to simply reword existing articles. The idea is that they want to "borrow" these articles...without Copyscape or other copy-protect programs picking up their "loan."

Although some people — specifically, the clients that post these ads and the writers who answer them — don't consider this plagiarism or copyright infringement, I disagree. Even if you play musical chairs with the wording, the "new" article is still pretty much the same work, just wearing a dime-store disguise.

While researching an article for a client, I ran across a prime example: an article that was "borrowed" from two existing articles, both of which ranked on the first page of the search engine results. (In other words, the "writer" didn't spend very long "researching.")

Here are the two articles that were borrowed from:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Want-To-Consolidate-Credit-Card-Debt?&id=80580
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/cc/19990329.asp

Here is the plagiarism:
http://www.brajeshwar.com/finance/badcredit/consolidate-credit-card.html

If you read through all three, you can see that the first article is copied sentence for sentence — if not word for word — in the third article. The second article is not copied quite so closely, but I think it is still arguably plagiarism, as all of the main points — and some similar sentences — are there.

I actually come across these things quite frequently in my research for this client — I guess his topics are popular ones. I have noticed that one of the hallmarks of these "borrowed" articles is poor English. Often, the words are replaced with synonyms that are close in meaning but not exact, and the sentences are rephrased so that they don't quite make sense anymore. Sometimes an extraneous "a" or other short word is inserted into a sentence — seemingly a typo, but I actually think it is either 1) intentionally placed to fool Copyscape, or 2) an indication of how poor the "writer's" English really is.

My opinion is that, no matter how you replace words or rephrase sentences, if you are copying an article point by point then it is plagiarism and copyright infringement. In fact, I would say that if you only have one or two sources, then you are in serious danger of plagiarizing, even if it is unintentional.

What are your thoughts?

The problem with plagiarism

I ran across an article that explains, rather well I think, the evils of plagiarism. According to Meghan O'Rourke, the problem with plagiarism is not that one writer is writing something unoriginal, but that he or she is piggy-backing someone else's hard work.

I agree completely with that analysis. The last thing I want is someone using what I have worked hard to write as their own personal shortcut to fortune and fame. Well, maybe that's exaggerating it a little, but regardless I don't much like the idea of someone else taking advantage of the hard work I put into my writing so that they can take it easy.

Kaavya Viswanathan's novel pulled from the market - permanently?

Wow, there sure has been a lot of commotion over Kaavya Viswanathan's book! Yesterday, the publisher pulled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life from the shelves. Today, NPR's story on Opal makes it sound like this might be permanent. I really should have gone out right away yesterday (or sooner!) and bought the book, because now my book collector's nose is twitching. I read somewhere that only 55,000 copies of the full 100,000 had been shipped - that's a pretty small first edition, by modern standards. If the book comes out again in a revised edition, those "unedited" first editions will likely be worth quite a bit someday; if the book doesn't come out again at all, it's sure to be. Plagiarism or no, I'll be trying to find myself a copy of that book while I still can...

More updates on the Kaavya Viswanathan story

The potential plagiarism case of Kaavya Viswanathan and her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is becoming more interesting all of the time, judging the by articles that keep popping up about it. Two such articles announce that Viswanathan's publisher has withdrawn her book while they correct the offending passages, and explain how the case sheds some light on the book mills currently in operation.

As far as the first article goes, finding out that the first edition of the book was withdrawn makes the book collector in me bemoan the fact that I didn't buy it. First editions such as this one, that have been withdrawn or corrected after a short run, tend to become very valuable over time. Drat!

As for the second article, I confess I felt a start of familiararity when the book mill company was described. Essentially, the idea is that the company - who makes it their business to know what is selling and why - designs similar potential bestsellers, and then hires writers to flesh them out. It's not a new idea - the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series were only two of many, many syndicated children's series books early in the twentieth century, and from what I understand V.C. Andrews' books suffered a similar fate after her death. Not too long ago, I myself applied for what must have been a similar job, as the company was seeking writers who would write books for teens from an outline. Now, however, it seems that this practice is becoming rather dangerous.

Although Kaavya said that the company, Alloy, didn't have much hand in the creation of her novel, the article says that the graduation speech - one of the events in her novel that is claimed to parallel McCafferty's book - was not her idea, but her editor's suggestion. Is it possible that companies like Alloy follow the bestsellers a little bit too closely? I could see a company like that suggesting similar plots to different writers, with the assumption that not every aspiring writer gets published.

In any case, here is the latest on the Viswanathan scandal - you can decide for yourself what you think.

More on the book plagiarism case

I ran across another account of the story I blogged about previously: Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life versus Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. Check out this audio clip on NPR about Viswanathan's book.

Plagiarism happens in larger arenas, too!

I ran across this strange story, about Kaavya Viswanathan, the 19-year-old author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, which contains material she apparently accidentally plagiarized from Megan McCafferty.

At first I was reluctant to believe something like this could happen inadvertently. How can someone copy passages that closely, and not realize it?

Yet the question also is: how can someone deliberately copy passages that closely, and not make it word for word?

Think about all of the times you paraphrased research material, back in junior high and high school, before you realized that you have to know the material well enough that you can explain it without looking at the book. Think of how hard it is to put something in your own words when you're reading someone else's.

What really changed my mind on Viswanathan was something I'd heard or read once about Helen Keller. She tried her hand at writing children's books, except she basically plagiarized a book she'd been familiar with as a child. (I think she pretty young at the time, herself.) She had internalized the story without even consciously realizing she had ever read the book.

And, come to think of it, during my teenage years my writing was heavily influenced by books I read and regarded highly. Not to say I ever directly stole an idea - I hope I didn't, at any rate - but I definitely chose certain topics or settings because of other books I'd read. For example, after reading Avi's Something Upstairs I wrote a ghost story-romance; after reading a book about a girl kidnapped by Indians I wrote a similar story; and after reading Cathy Cash Spellman's Bless the Child I started writing about characters with telepathic and telekinetic abilities. When you really think about it, writers are all influenced by other writers - what matters is that they have take their own angle on the ideas that influenced them.

So, my own personal verdict is that Viswanathan is telling the truth - she copied the other writer's work unintentially and unconsciously. However, I think cases such as Viswanathan's - and, I'm sorry to say, Helen Keller's - speak for the importance of a writer having enough sense to know the difference between creating a story and remembering a story. And although I've read a great many books by very talented - and very young - authors, perhaps the ability to differentiate is something that young writers, for the most part, lack.