Sixteen Volts

Plagiarism has been a widely discussed hot topic for the past few days. Plagiarism is, of course, a serious offense for any writer. I have no problem severely punishing anybody who engages in it, whether it takes place in real world, academic research or an undergrad essay. In the world of undergrad teaching, plagiarism is a serious problem and far more common that most people or professors would assume. It needs to be detected and punished far more severely than the usual slaps in the wrist that are common these days because students are customers who have rights.

Since plagiarism is so easy and most college students are there only for the degree with no other interest or motivation, my guess is that these days almost a half of undergraduate students will plagiarize if they get a chance to do so. Anybody who believes that this number is significantly lower is, in my opinion, either seriously deluded or gets to enjoy a particularly motivated student body in their class. And the students get ample chances to plagiarize in this era of Internet and Google, or if they are willing to pay a little rather than fail the course or get the mark they need to stay in school (duh, what a difficult choice that must be), buy it from some essay-writing service or another student.

In undergraduate essays, the issue of plagiarism is typically cut and dried. Students who need to plagiarize are by necessity so stupid and inept that they will have to plagiarize so much and so clumsily that once they are caught, there is no question whatsoever about intentional wrongdoing. However, the same doesn't necessarily hold in the upper levels of academia and in the real world. I know it is redundant to say that an essay by Steve Dutch is excellent and it gets tiresome to link there so often, but I shall now point the reader to "Sense and Nonsense about Plagiarism", which argues that busybodies have these days taken plagiarism witchhunts too far. If you don't want to read the whole essay, here is the money paragraph:

One obvious question I have never seen addressed in any discussion of plagiarism is this: in any copied text, is there any other viable way to express the idea? If there isn’t, then regardless of how exact the quote is, it can’t be plagiarism. Saying “The Civil War began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter,” or “Plants obtain energy through photosynthesis” isn’t plagiarism for the simple reason those are about the simplest and most direct ways to express those ideas. Only contrived wording could rearrange those sentences significantly. (“When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War began,” or maybe Yoda-speak: “Began the Civil War did when Confederate forces on Fort Sumter fired.”) Therefore I propose:

Rule 1: If some particular wording is the best way to phrase an idea, or there are few other practical ways to phrase an idea, unattributed usage is not plagiarism. If all the best ways of expressing an idea have been used, a subsequent author has no choice but to use someone else’s words. If the idea has been covered that often, it has probably entered the domain of common knowledge anyway.

Everything in this essay and especially Rule 1 should be common sense. It should also be common sense that if you weaken and take away enough meaning from some negative term (for example, "rapist" to mean a man who looks at a woman one second too long, or "racist" to mean somebody who thinks that people should be judged with the exact same criteria regardless of their race) so that this term starts to apply to a sufficiently large number of people, in the end you have hurt nobody but your side. A negative term that applies to a majority of people will quickly lose all its power to slur or condemn. This is no different for the word "plagiarist".

Right now, plagiarism has been a hot topic with Ben Domenech, the young conservative pundit who was hired to pen for Washington Post but who had to resign after the blogosphere revealed him to have plagiarized. Now, the consensus of Ben's plagiarism seems to strong that I am not going to argue against it, especially when the guy himself confessed and apologized. My problem, in light of Prof. Dutch's essay and Rule 1 quoted above, is that none of the supposed examples that I have seen have established him as a plagiarist. Maybe I haven't seen the most egregious examples. But when I take a look at a few of these supposed cases of "plagiarism", I seriously have to wonder.

First, "Domenech, Continued" quotes the original review of the movie "Pay It Forward":

This is a film the studio knows casual moviegoers will love and critics will not…

whereas in his review, Domenech wrote that

…Pay It Forward is exactly the type of film that the casual moviegoer will love, and critics will pan.

Let's just say that I am less than impressed. If I wanted to prove that somebody was a plagiarist, and this was the best example that I would put in first (and the post explicitly says that "The Pay It Forward review is the worst of what we've found"), I would seriously reconsider my accusation.

If any of my readers is able to express the idea of the quoted sentence so that it is not plagiarism using the same standard of plagiarism that is apparently used here, please do so in the comments. Or perhaps the problem is "stealing ideas" instead of words, so that if one reviewer has already predicted that a movie will appeal to audiences but not to critics, no other reviewer can make the same prediction without proper attribution. Is this really the way that it is? I don't see any other way for the above quote to be plagiarism. If so, there is going to be huge practical problems with thousands of movie reviewers out there.

Then we have news reporting, especially one that paraphrases some other person's words. In this comment, we have the original

...officials said Attorney General Janet Reno had decided that someone from outside the department and the FBI should lead a new investigation into the use of potentially incendiary tear gas cartridges by federal agents during the final assault on the compound.

and Domenech's piece that says

Officials representing the Justice Department announced Wednesday Attorney General Janet Reno had decided someone from outside the department and the FBI should lead a new investigation into the actions of the FBI prior to the assault on the compound.

Again, the same challenge: express the same content and general idea so that it is not plagiarism and expresses what the said officials said.

Domenech also once used the nonsensical expression "warped as road rash on velvet", whereas Jonah Goldberg had previously invented used "gay as road rash on velvet". According to Google search, this is the only use of "road rash on velvet". So if people come up with new expressions and additions to the English language, they own them so that nobody else can use them without proper attribution? This principle sounds to me about as strange as a talking banana. I know that I have many times used some individual phrase or expression that I have learned somewhere else, especially those from The Simpsons or the various net comics that I enjoy or by The Danimal (the latter of which I happen to know extremely well since that I sifted through them and compiled them myself) in many other contexts. This simply is not plagiarism.

If the threshold for plagiarism is so low that the above examples constitute plagiarism, then I am also undeniably a plagiarist and many times over. Could this be the end of my potential writing career before it even started? In the end, I don't really care that much. A definition of plagiarism that is this low would be totally meaningless and I will not bother to follow it, since I have no practical way to ensure that some sentence or turn of phrase or comparison or argument or idea that I write hasn't been used somewhere else so that I read it there and have since forgotten it from my conscious mind.

Fortunately, now that I have browsed through several other web pages about this incident, I can see that there are pages that contain examples of actual indisputable plagiarism, such as "Domenech appears to have copied three new pieces" and "Nail? Meet Coffin."

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, March 29, 2006 at 11:56 AM