FYWP

Thanks to once & always FYWP instructor Andrew Ladd for sharing these thoughts on plagiarism.

Last year, one scientific journal publisher had to reject 23% of its submissions because they turned out to be plagiarized. The figure sounds so unbelievably high that if didn’t itself come from the renowned scientific journal Nature, I’d be tempted not to believe it. 23%! Among degree-holding, bona fide academics! And this wasn’t an aberration, either: the same publisher had to reject 10% and 6% of submissions from two of its other journals for the same reason. Either real academics plagiarize a lot more than students do, or I am seriously bad at spotting plagiarists. 

There’s plenty more to think about in the Nature article, too, beyond those staggering percentages. Like: journal publishers run submissions, without thinking twice, through the same kind of plagiarism-detection software that, when applied to student papers, routinely generates heated discussions of trust and ethics and responsibility. Or: the admission by the director of journal services at Elsevier that “there are only so many different ways you can describe how to run a gel... Plagiarism of results or the discussion is a greater concern.” This neatly draws a distinction I think most writing teachers would also make, though perhaps less blithely: it’s at most a venial sin to omit quotes around background info taken from Wikipedia, but taking credit for someone else’s ideas (the “results” of an opinion paper) is far more serious.

What I really began to wonder as I read this article, though, was why we make such a big deal out of plagiarism at all. When you’re a career academic it’s easy to get wrapped up in the exacting standards of perfectly attributed intellectual discourse. But clearly there are situations—like describing how to run a gel—when plagiarism is a useful shortcut that doesn’t really compromise intellectual integrity. In any case, for every job I’ve ever had outside academia, plagiarism, or at least patch-writing, has been a matter of course. Frequently, in fact, it’s been an essential duty. Even positions I’ve taken billed as “writing” jobs involve massaging other sources into a consistent corporate voice without attribution just as much as producing original prose. 

And the reality is, no matter how much we might want our students to become prolific, creative geniuses, some of them are going to end up getting desk jobs just like that, where the ability to plagiarize convincingly is a necessary skill. So perhaps we’re doing a disservice by treating it as a crime across the board. Perhaps, instead, we need to acknowledge that in most “genres” beyond the academic it’s a regular part of the writing process—and that a balanced writing education should teach students not just how to avoid it, but how, in appropriate situations, to do it better.