I’m sorry I missed the opportunity to post about plagiarism on Anti Plagiarism day, which took place, according to Writer Beware and numerous other sources, yesterday, while I was busy reading the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, circa 1940.
I scrambled to catch up with what the rest of the writing world all ready new, read some classic cases of plagiarism, including one that consists of chunks of a text about ferrets inserted into a bodice ripper (no, really). I also managed to put to bed an awful fear that’s dogged me since Tenth Man came out.
I have an absolute terror not of someone stealing my ideas (which, I understand, is pretty common, and about which Victoria Stauss has written at length), but of accidentally plagiarizing other people.
University was really, really hard for me. Tuition was going up, I knew it was going to increase every year, so I took as many courses as I could in a year and did my four year degree in three. To do this while working full time, I learned to memorize chunks of books, images and their sources, parts of lectures that profs emphasized. I got through essay exams by regurgitating professorial lectures and quoting text books. Four years after my degree, I can still quote some of the text books (though the lectures have faded away completely). I memorize most of what I read if I’m interested in it, and I have a fear of regurgitating a chunk of, say, John le Carre’s cool spy essay and then trying to pass it off as my own.
Well hooray for Anti Plagiarism day, because I now know a few things I didn’t know before. The first is that plagiarism doesn’t happen accidentally. The quantity of stolen material is usually huge. The second thing is that people seem to plagiarize not when they have a fear of doing it, but when they don’t see what all the fuss is about. The final thing is that plagiarism doesn’t happen very often in the professional writing world. And that’s very good news indeed. Phew.
