Once again last week, we got to see a high-profile public figure get caught up in the scandal of plagiarism. A significant portion of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s wife Melania’s speech at the Republican National Convention was copied from a speech given in 2008 by another First Lady wannabe – Michelle Obama.
When the plagiarism came to light, the Trump campaign offered a variety of responses; first, that she wrote the speech herself and then later, that a speechwriter “wrote” the speech for her. Said speechwriter publicly took full credit for her lapse in integrity.
Either way, someone took something that someone else had written without sourcing the information.
As a writer, there is little that makes me angrier than plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the taking of sentences, phrases, written thoughts or ideas that were developed by someone else and presenting them as if they were your own. Without identifying the original source, it is similar to stealing.
As a university instructor, I spend a lot of time talking about plagiarism.
Most of us learned in elementary school that copying off someone else on a test was cheating. As we were learning to write book reports and other research papers, we learned about bibliographies and identifying where we found our materials. Sourcing materials became more sophisticated in high school, college and especially graduate school but the message has been consistent: If you didn’t come up with with it, the person who did should get the credit.
And then along came the internet.
It has been suggested that the internet has not only made it easier to cheat and to plagiarize but, in some respects, almost encourages sharing the work of others. We can download music, pictures, funny stories, and even research articles with the click of the keyboard and then “share” what we found with others.
The ease with which the internet can perpetuate plagiarism cannot be overstated.
In the many years that I have been teaching, I’ve seen the outright taking of materials from someone else way too often. Sometimes, it’s students submitting work that is uncannily similar to another student. Most times, however, it’s about lifting stuff from the internet. I will be sitting at my desk, reading a paper and suddenly the “voice” of the paper changes. It either doesn’t sound like the student’s voice or the voice of the paper changes drastically from one paragraph to the next. A quick check of Google and it’s not uncommon to find that the whole passage has been lifted. I’ve seen instances where the student didn’t even bother to change font on the passage that has been cut and pasted from the internet before inserting it in their paper.
They think we won’t notice.
They think we won’t use programs like TURNITIN, which is an internet-based program that allows faculty to see how much content in each paper matches other sources.
They insist that it was an accident or a simple mistake. “I must have submitted my rough draft instead of the final copy which had the sourcing.”
To quote the tutorial from Penn State Libraries on plagiarism, “I didn’t know” is not an excuse. We know because we learned it in elementary school.
With flash drives, internet sharing and shared documents on programs like Google, it is easy to fall into the quicksand of plagiarism unless one is very judicious.
I have suggested that there should be an alarm on the mouse or the cut and paste feature of our devices. That way, we would be at least be alerted when we start the stealing process.
As we tell students, if they make an attempt to say where they found the materials or try to identify the person who developed the ideas, they will never be accused of plagiarism. The student may lose some points for not using proper citation but at least making an attempt will not result in disciplinary action.
Most of us wouldn’t walk into a store and put something in our pocket without paying. Claiming that a paragraph or theory or a song or something else that someone created is stealing too.
If Melania Trump had made the highly unlikely decision to say “To quote Mrs. Obama…” before reading that part of the speech that wasn’t hers, we wouldn’t be having the plagiarism conversation today.
Sadly, Mrs. Trump is not alone. Martin Luther King. Vice President Joe Biden. Jane Goodall. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Johnny Cash. Jayson Blair. Many famous journalists, authors, songwriters, politicians and scientists have been busted for trying to pass off the work of others as their own. The excuses are pretty lame. When caught, the accused often point the fingers at others (like their speechwriters) or talk about sloppy note taking or editorial skills. Pointing the finger at others and saying “they did it too” does not make it okay. In the end, stealing is still stealing.
My friend Dorothea likes to say it’s not that hard to not be a jerk. Similarly, it’s not that hard to give the person who came up with an idea credit for their work or creativity.
