Monday, April 28, 2008

a plagiarism tale

Today I found out that Living it Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury by James Twitchell, a book I've used in numerous articles, includes many plagiarized passages, which saddens me to no end. This realization also angers me because I used this book as a source for my own work in good faith, and it turns out the author was not careful in preparing his manuscript. Those of you who are students in my English Comp classes have heard me talk about how your papers are only as credible as your least credible source...now, what do I say about my work when it turns out one of my sources contains plagiarism?!?

In a serendipitous twist, I went to grad school with Jack Stripling, the local news reporter covering this story for The Gainesville Sun! A small world indeed. You can read his column and see excerpts of the plagiarized passages here

5 comments:

Kyle said...

I would like to take this opportunity to request an -A on a paper you gave me a B on, due to mild plagiarism. I figure in your state of humility you might understand how easy it is to make a FEW mistakes. :D

Dr. J said...

nice try, kyle! the only flaw in your plan is that i'm not actually in a "state of humility" because I'm still not the one who plagiarized:)

Anonymous said...

You know, I've come across this as well. Actually Dr. King who is known to be a very important person when it comes to the Civil rights movement, he actually plagerized some of his work...which really upset me as well. To think...even the most famous people do it too...bummer...

Dr. J said...

Good point, Cristy! Another interesting thing to consider is that plagiarism didn't used to be such a big deal...many early authors (including Shakespeare!) borrowed from other writers...and we could talk about the practice of "sampling" in music, which could also be seen as plagiarizing...

Kyle said...

So tell the writing committee to remove the stick from their ass… or at lest be lenient. I am writing a research paper now and after read 10 articles I can’t remember if my thesis is even my own… Now who has the crappy memory huh.

P.S. You're guilty by association.