Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Plagiarism won't give career a lift
By Cindy Richards
Chicago Sun-TimesPublished: 7/12/06
Excerpt:
Interesting thoughts
on plagiarism in Sunday's Sun-Times. In case you missed Mike Thomas'
piece on the cover of the Controversy section, it said basically that
we're seeing an increase in the instances of plagiarism in the newsroom
because we, as veteran journalists, aren't doing enough to teach cub
reporters what plagiarism is and to vet the stories our young reporters
write to run in the paper.
Hogwash.
If any problem in America could be cured by a big dose of personal responsibility, this is it. ...
... In his piece, Thomas
wrote (that's called attribution, or giving credit to the original
writer): "Like bird flu and Arctic temperatures, plagiarism is on the
rise. More than ever, it seems, writers siphon stuff from the Internet,
books, magazines and newspapers and pass it off as their own,
apparently oblivious to the seriousness of the ethical lapse . . .
(ellipses denote that the quote continues beyond our purpose in lifting
it)."
(The quote marks are important; they delineate an actual word-for-word lifting of the original prose.)
See? It's easy. A little attribution goes a long way.
Perhaps the problem is that there is no punishment to fit this crime, another point raised by
Thomas (attribution again, this time without quotes to show that I have
merely paraphrased his text, not borrowed it outright).
He quotes (once more,
credit to the source) Poynter Institute senior faculty member and
writing coach Chip Scanlan, who said that if you put plagiarism in a
criminal context, we need to know, "Is there a plagiaristic
misdemeanor? Is there a plagiarism felony? And if so, what are the
punishments?"
More of this article...
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