Monday, October 2, 2017

Plagiarism

QUESTION:  What is plagiarism?  If I borrow an author’s style, is that plagiarism?  

Plagiarism is a very complex issue.  The most obvious example is a writer who has cobbled together many paragraphs of someone else's work with their own words as cement.  

A less obvious example is someone who uses someone else's work as a template to their own.  Each scene is a rewrite of a scene in someone else's novel.  

Another very common form of plagiarism is cutting and pasting text from a nonfiction source into a novel.

Famous writers certainly aren't exempt from being guilty of plagiarism.  Janet Dailey's flagrant plagiarism of Nora Roberts' novels is a perfect example.  (JD was proven guilty and had to pay restitution.)
  
Not so famous writers are also found guilty of the same thing.  Some years back, a teenaged novelist had her first novel pulled off shelves when readers found that she'd patched together several other books to create her own.

Copying someone’s style isn’t plagiarism as long as you aren’t copying content.  Many new writers try to emulate a favorite author’s style because they haven’t found their own yet.  After a few years, gained confidence, and the sheer difficulty of maintaining someone else’s voice, most develop their own style.  

As a reader, if you feel that the two books are so similar that it might be plagiarism, you should contact the publisher or the author, express your concerns, and let them decide whether this is plagiarism or not.  

Most authors have websites these day with contact information as do publisher websites.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I taught legal subjects online for fifteen years for three different colleges-Kraplan, Westwood and Vatterott- during the golden age of cut'n'paste plagiarism.

Kaplan had a person on staff who had a PhD in Linguistics and her method of detection was ridiculously simple. Five words in a string are just about unique in all the world. Take five words from a written work, put them in quotation marks and plug them into the google search window and if it is out there you'll find it.

I would tell my students "Look. This is how I do it. If you cut'n'paste I'll find it." and still they tried and tried.

I stopped doing academic misconduct reports-too time consuming. Instead I removed the incentive to plagiarize by instituting a policy of an unappealable zero for plagiarized assignments.

Ultimately I got fired by one school for washing out too many plagiarists.

But I wonder how AI GPT3 random text generators will affect this.