Few people care to tackle it head-on, and no one wants to admit it, but I’m going to talk about the one subject we writers fear the most: plagiarism. Several weeks ago, I was accused of inadvertent plagiarism after 38 years of being called nothing but highly original (among other things). I was terribly upset and determined to get to the root of the problem. People may not have always liked or agreed with my writing but no one has ever charged me with copying anything. (Oh wait, there was that time in seventh grade when my English teacher thought I stole a poem that was actually a rendering of my thoughts regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But that was when dinosaurs roamed the earth and before Google, so it doesn’t really count.)
But maybe I missed something so I dove into my personal writing bible, the Chicago Manual of Style. A quick refresher course of “Rights and Permissions” in Chapter 4 only reinforced what I’d thought all along about “fair use”: That authors may quote from another author’s work to “illustrate or buttress their own points.” Along with transcribing the information accurately, authors should also credit their sources, taking care not to quote out of context or make the source appear to “be saying something opposite to or different from, what was intended” (section 4.75). The Chicago manual also says, “it is important to identify the original as the source,” as it not only “bolsters the claim of fair use, it also helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism” (section 4.83). So far, so good.
The next step was to further explore the concept of inadvertent plagiarism, which is basically copying someone’s words or ideas without consciously meaning to. Here is where things can get dicey as many of the available tools are aimed at students and beginning writers. One Huffington Post piece blithely exhorted writers, “Before ‘signing off’ of [sic] the article, paste it into one of the many ‘plagiarism checkers’ available online.” The author’s recommendations ranged from the expensive (Grammarly) to the almost free (Copyscape) to no charge whatsoever (Plagiarisma). I also found Quetext which was free, accurate and easy to use. And, of course, there’s always Google, which is what I have always utilized.
But I’ve always been hypervigilant (or so I thought) about attributing sources. And I saw no logical reason to run every word I’ve written through a plagiarism checker since I know they came from either my overburdened brain or a cited source. I have enough to do, thank you very much.
Still there is some useful information on policing your own plagiarism. While somewhat basic, the article “Are You Plagiarizing Without Knowing It?” clearly defines several types of plagiarism, offers examples of what is and what is not stealing one’s ideas or words and also mentions self-plagiarism which can be more serious than it sounds, especially if you are passing old stuff off as entirely new. This can be a real problem, especially if you don’t own the copyright or are (almost) famous. Just ask Jonah Lehrer, disgraced science writer, who in 2012, among other fabrications, was caught recycling earlier blog posts while on staff at The New Yorker, losing his job and book contracts amid public disgrace and high-paying speaking engagements that undoubtedly helped offset the sting of his humiliation. The article also discusses paraphrasing “restating an author’s words or ideas without giving credit to the original author,” a slippery slope indeed, because it can “also involve… new sentence and paragraph structure.”
The American Medical Association Manual of Style offers ups yet another permutation, mosaic plagiarism “… borrowing the ideas and opinions from an original source and a few verbatim words or phrases without crediting the original author… the plagiarist intertwines his or her own ideas and opinions with those of the original author…” (Section 4.2).
Or as Perspectives in Clinical Research puts it: “The sentence or paragraph structure is almost similar to the original source with a few words and phrases here and there which are the author’s own….When the referencing is proper and quotation marks are adequately used, it is clear which of the words are by the author and which are from a different source. Unless this is done honestly, it could leave the reader confused.” Are we having fun yet?
Finally, armed with all this information, I had a lawyer friend check my work. After spending hours pouring over the material we did indeed find one list that had been directly taken from a web site that was advertising a report, although I did supply the link before citing the list so at the time I thought it was OK. In every other case, however, the source was either mentioned and/or directly quoted.
While upsetting and seemingly unfair, the incident has made me more aware of the various pitfalls of inadvertent plagiarism. It is always better to err on the side of obsessive-compulsive, because you can always point to the source and say, “He said that!”
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