I Copied You - Deal With It

It's blog-writing night, but I'm bummin' about the Gophers' tough loss to Penn St. in tonight's volleyball match.  It's one thing to lose a tough game to a tough team; it's another to lose that game while getting hosed by the refs.  Penn St. feasted on multiple helpings of home cookin' tonight.  My daughters and I have tickets to the rematch, though, so we're already counting the days until we head to The Pav to witness another clash between these two volleyball powerhouses.

Down in the dumps with no ideas....so I've dug into the archives for a short piece I wrote a long time ago for a Master's class.  I believe it was an ethics class, the paper's topic was plagiarism, and my point was how tough it is to avoid plagiarizing in a world that is running out of new ideas.  In case you aren't connecting the dots here, I'm regurgitating an old piece of writing that spoke of a lack of ideas on a night when I have no ideas.  Enjoy.

           “Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.”  (Don’t know who, don’t know when).  Some in the academic world might accuse me of plagiarism in this case; some might believe the saying to be common knowledge, making citation unnecessary.  Either way, it is an example of a common ethical dilemma in the world of research and writing:  What should be sited and what should not?

            If plagiarism is the use of someone else’s thinking without giving them credit for it, the opening line of this paper was plagiarized.  I did not make the quote up, but I have used it many times in conversation without giving credit to its author.  Am I guilty of a crime?  Come to think of it, the definition of plagiarism in the first sentence of this paragraph is not my definition, but one I have been taught many times over during my academic career.  Again, have I committed a crime for not giving credit to the person who first described what plagiarism is?  This is getting very confusing, but I have to keep in mind that things are never so bad that they can’t get worse (Uncle David, circa 2000).

            Maybe we have reached a point in our society where it has become impossible to avoid plagiarism because we have used up all the ideas.  Oh brother, what if someone else has already written about this?!  I swear I came up with this one on my own!  With so many sources of information available and so many people publishing so much work in so many different venues how can we possibly know what is original thought and what has already been thought?  (I can almost guarantee nobody has ever written that sentence before.)  Citations are required when a writer uses information taken from someone else, but they do not necessarily help know whose thought is which, or something like that.  Reading the works of an author who borrowed data from their favorite author who studied the research of a college intern who got the idea for the research from a former professor gets very.......painful.  Perhaps it is time for some new rules about what needs to be sited and what does not.

            If your sentence has a number in it include the source unless you were responsible for generating the number.  Dates should be sited.  Song lyrics?  Site ‘em (Unless it's a country song; there are only three different topics for country songs, and none are all that special).  Everything else is off limits for charges of plagiarism.  When a student turns in a paper based on research, do not quibble over which ideas are his and which belong to somebody else.  Life is short, so just be happy with the effort given to get the paper done.

            If someone decided to copy my work I would be flattered.  If someone chose to copy this work I would be worried.  Too many people are getting lathered up about having their work copied instead of just enjoying the fact that their work was interesting enough to warrant being copied.  As my grandfather always said “No matter where you go in life, there you are.”  I have no clue what that has to do with plagiarism, but at least I gave it a decent citation.  Except I think he stole the quote from someone.......

References

Elhard, D.  (circa 2000, summer)  The Fish Aren’t Biting, The Mosquitoes Are, and the Rain              is Falling Harder.  Pine Lake Fishing Excursion.