| ashu |
Posted
on 14-Jan-02 02:46 AM
From Slate.com
Some extracts:
One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology.
Plagiarism bloodlettings occur with a dreary regularity. Every few months, a reporter or writer is caught copying a dozen paragraphs from a newspaper here or stealing a few choice lines from an obscure magazine there. (Every time it happens, colleagues throw up their hands and say, "You moron—didn't you know that people read [the Washington Post, the National Journal, Martin Amis …]")
The list of writers snared over the years is long and depressingly impressive: NPR's Nina Totenberg, who plagiarized a Washington Post story about Tip O'Neill when she was a young print reporter; the New York Times' Fox Butterfield, who rooked several paragraphs of a Boston Globe story—a story about plagiarism; Alex Haley, who settled with a writer he ripped off for Roots; hot young novelist Jacob Epstein, who took 53 passages from a Martin Amis novel; the New Republic's Ruth Shalit, caught snipping sentences hither and thither for five different stories; Martin Luther King Jr., who lifted much of his dissertation; Sen. Joe Biden, forced out of the 1988 presidential campaign for serial plagiarism—he then plagiarized his withdrawal speech—etc., etc.
No matter what they steal, they fall back on the same excuses, as Thomas Mallon shows in his wonderful plagiarism book Stolen Words. Before the computer age, they blamed their confusing "notebooks," where they allegedly mixed up their own notes with passages recorded elsewhere. These days, plagiarists claim they mistake electronic files of notes with their own writing.
Plagiarists steal for reasons both profound and mundane. In a few cases, plagiarism flows from some deep psychological wellspring: Epstein, the son of eminent literary parents, stole so much and from such an obvious source that he was clearly "committing literary suicide," writes Mallon. Some writers plagiarize because they are rushing a project through and probably don't think they'll get caught. Some are just exceptionally careless.
Plagiarists are almost always bright, Mallon notes, and they often write better than those they rob. Shalit, for example, writes like a sparkler, yet stole routine material to fill out her pieces. Ambrose's books are gripping. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the English language's masters, thieved huge parcels from German writers.
As the Columbia Journalism Review chronicled in 1995, plagiarists suffer vastly different punishments for similar offenses. Some are sacked for a single misdemeanor shoplifting. Some keep their jobs after numerous felonies. Some are briefly suspended; others sidelined for months. Some pay huge settlements to the writers they have ripped off; most don't pay a penny. This variation, says Mallon, indicates our deep confusion about plagiarism. "We don't have a clear set of sanctions for it. We don't even have a clear idea what it is," he says. "Thinking about it is really intellectually unformed, even my thinking, and I wrote a book. It is extremely elusive."
It's so difficult to think about plagiarism for several reasons. First, all writers, especially good writers, borrow and imitate. That's how we learn. We are constantly influenced unconsciously by things we read. And it can be hard to distinguish an homage from an imitation from a borrowing from a bank robbery.
Writers are uncertain about plagiarism because none of us are certain that we are innocent. I frequently imitate the style of writers I admire. I surely have recycled snappy phrases I've read. I can't tell you what they are, but I bet they're out there. I have a fear—which I suspect is shared by most writers—that somewhere, in something I wrote, I may have even stolen a sentence. I don't remember doing it. I would never do it intentionally. But could I swear that it never happened? No. This is—to steal a phrase—our anxiety of influence.
Plagiarism is also confusing because we don't know whom it hurts. Plagiarism doesn't harm readers. They rarely know that something they read is ripped off.
In a 1997 New Yorker essay, James Kincaid argued that plagiarism should not bother writers so much. Most journalism is mediocre, unoriginal prose, Kincaid says, so writers shouldn't mind if it gets recycled. Some literary theorists minimize plagiarism for a related reason. They are skeptical of the ideas of authorship and originality, contending that everything new is cobbled together from older sources.
But these scholars, you will note, publish their articles under their own bylines. And both they and Kincaid ignore what makes the plagiarist so sinister. For writers, the act of putting particular words in a particular order is our hard labor. Even when the result is mediocre and unoriginal, it is our own mediocrity. The words are our proof of life, the evidence we can present at heaven's gate that we have not frittered away our three score and ten.
The plagiarist is, in a minor way, the cop who frames innocents, the doctor who kills his patients. The plagiarist violates the essential rule of his trade. He steals the lifeblood of a colleague. A few paragraphs have made Stephen Ambrose a vampire.
http://slate.msn.com//?id=2060618
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