on the subject of plagiarism…

I suppose that I should write something about the Harvard student who plagiarized parts of her book. (Everything you could ever want to know about it here.)

It would be easy to condemn her for the obviously stolen passages: a side-by-side comparison reminds me of the “thesaurus replacement” strategy I used through most of college when I found something particularly perfect for inclusion in a paper. For those of you who are genuinely brilliant and have never needed to use such dishonest tactics, it basically involves taking a passage and looking up alternate words in the thesaurus, or rearranging the phrases to create a sentence that sounds completely new & is not Google-able. Usually it leads to odd-sounding phrasing and word choices, because the originals were the best way to make the point. Sadly.

Also, since this will be literary confessions time, I once submitted several of my sister’s essay homeworks in 10th grade English class. All I did was change the name and date. In my own defense, the teacher didn’t actually read the assignments. Her method was a casual check for grammar mistakes and a grade assignment based on their frequency and how much she liked you. It’s hard to feel bad about that, although I doubt my sister ever knew I did it. Regardless of my minimal-appreciation-begets-minimal-work defense, it wasn’t exactly the right thing to do.

It is because of these experiences with plagiarism that I would be a hypocrite to denounce her.

I really, really want to, though. She received nearly 10 times my annual salary to write the book, whereas my brief flirtations with literary theft got me… sleep and still-not-stellar grades. From what I’ve seen (although, to be fair, what I’ve seen has been the odd-sounding copied paragraphs, so perhaps the rest of the book was better?), she’s not even a terribly talented writer. The entirety of my favorites list has a better style. And for all her insistence of “internalization” (which could be feasible, as I have done it before), the stolen parts sound as though they were written with a copy of the other books open in front of her.

On the subject of my own writing past, everyone can be assured that what I write now comes from my own brain. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone as it’s not very good.

P.S. Hi!