Select. Copy. Paste. Voilà!

A few days ago, I read a
Care2Causes blog by Kristina Chew about plagiarism. Chew opens her
blog by noting that Germany’s minister of education recently resigned and
was stripped of her Ph.D. because she had plagiarized her dissertation.
The second paragraph tells us that seventy students at Harvard were sent
home because they’d all cheated on a take-home exam. Their exams were identical
down to typos. “Everybody cheats,” Chew wrote, “not just because it’s just
too easy. We cut and paste because we’ve got the technology to do so. Courtesy
of Wikipedia and the Internet, there’s a seemingly endless amount of material
to draw on and so much that it’s easy to think, ‘how will someone every
[
sic.] find that I’ve taken words that were not my own from this obscure
site?’”




Back during the high renaissance, when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation
on the persona of Cleopatra in the English plays about her (between 1592
and 1898), plagiarism took a lot more work. I was writing my dissertation
in 1975–76, and “consumer computers” were just being developed. I don’t
think I ever saw a computer on the campus at Southern Illinois University,
Carbondale, though I do remember the first computer at Southeast Missouri
State in Cape Girardeau, where I earned my M.A. That was in 1968. The computer
filled an entire, air conditioned room with elevated floors. Also
Wikipedia didn’t go online until 2001. Plagiarism was a lot harder
to commit back then. You couldn’t just select and copy and paste. If you
wanted to copy something, you had to key it in yourself, and I doubt that
anybody can type well enough not to make any errors. (See the sic I added
in the quote in the first paragraph.).




Since I was writing about plays published in the 17th and 18th centuries,
I spent a lot of time either with my head in a microfiche machine or reading
rolls of microfilm. The only copy I could find of one play,
The Play-House to be Lett (1663) by Sir William D’avenant (who claimed
to be Shakespeare’s godson, but wasn’t), had been microfiched from the
parchment copy. That means I could see both sides of each sheet at the
same time and I also had to wade through the Restoration spelling and typography
with those funny S’s that look like F’s. I typed my chapters on a portable
typewriter, and the final, approved, signed-off version was typed (by the
department secretary) on an IBM Selectric. I have one of the two bound
copies on my bookshelf. It sure would have been easier if I could have
found the eleven plays I studied online, but that wasn’t even remotely
possible.




Over the past decade-plus, I have edited quite a few works of academic
discourse. One of the first was a Ph.D. dissertation titled
That Which Stimulates and Numbs Us: The Museum in the Age of Trauma,
which the author describes as “a theoretical study that straddles the fields
of psychoanalysis, visual studies, museum studies, and post-Foucauldian
French philosophy.” It was fascinating! (And about half as long as my dissertation.)
Another early project was an incomprehensible master’s thesis by a school
psychologist. More recently, I’ve edited five Ph.D. theses by candidates
at Lancaster University in northern England. They, too, were interesting.
My challenges were to remember British punctuation and to help the Greek
and German candidates with more idiomatic English. I also edited a D. Min.
project (dissertation) by a Unitarian minister on the topic of cruelty
to animals. The day I edited the chapter about Chicken McNuggets, I went
outside for my walk and found a chicken walking down 4th St. in Long Beach.
I’d never seen or heard it before, never did again.




Very few of my authors plagiarize, although some of them try to include
lyrics from rock songs without getting written permission from the copyright
holder. Copyright law is exceedingly complex, but in general terms, you
can quote poetry or song lyrics if the author died more than seventy years
ago…unless his estate holds the copyright. Homer, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare,
and Milton are pretty safe; popular songs require permission. When my authors
use lyrics, it’s not dishonesty but naiveté. Most of them don’t know until
I tell them.




How do I recognize possible plagiarism? The person’s writing style changes.
When someone who writes like he’s never read a book in his life suddenly
spouts postmodern litcrit jargon, my little Editor OCD bell starts ringing.
This happened in the early nineties when I was teaching at a for-profit
university (where students work all day and go to school one or two nights
a week). An insurance adjuster suddenly wrote a perfect literary essay.
Ding, ding, ding. I asked him about it. Did he want to add a footnote?
No, ma’am, he did not. I did a bit of research on my own, found his source,
and went to see the dean. The student tried to sue the school because I
was picking on him.




What is the solution to plagiarism? I think it’s simple—give credit where
credit is due. Cite your sources. Make footnotes. If you use a lot of an
author’s work, thank him or her in your acknowledgments. Don’t just do
a Google search for your topic, find something that looks interesting (but
may not be accurate), and steal it. If it’s good, summarize it. Quote one
or two sentences if they’re so good or telling you couldn’t say it as well
yourself, but cite the source for these sentences. Do your own work and
work hard so it’s something you’ll be proud of. Do not select, copy, and
paste.