Let’s make writing original again

The Republican National Convention had barely started this week when a controversy arose: A speech by Melania Trump, the wife of GOP nominee Donald Trump, contained verbatim passages from First Lady Michelle Obama’s address during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. It was the latest in a long cavalcade of bizarre occurrences during an even stranger presidential campaign season.

Using someone else’s work without giving credit is not acceptable. It’s likened to theft and even fraud. If the notion that it’s wrong to claim another person’s words as one’s own doesn’t come naturally, it certainly is drummed into our heads in school.

Yet it still happens. Even Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin “admitted that she had inadvertently copied more passages than previously acknowledged — dozens — and from several sources”. Sometimes the excuse is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen – research and editorial assistants find bits and pieces and they slip through because no one takes responsibility for quality control.

Although it’s likely plagiarism has been around as long as there’s been shared language, computers, and especially the internet, have fueled it. Cutting and pasting words from an online source is easy. It takes more effort to research, digest information and use original words to communicate about any given subject.

Some have taken the scourge of plagiarism head on. One example is Turnitin, an online grading company started by a group of UC Berkeley students in 1998, which provides originality checking and grading tools. My kids used Turnitin throughout school and college. (A teacher once accused one of my daughters of plagiarism and it took a thorough vetting via Turnitin to prove the instructor was wrong.)

Using findings from a worldwide survey of educators, Turnitin released a white paper defining plagiarism titled, “The Plagiarism Spectrum”. The paper identifies 10 types of unoriginal work and ranks them according to severity based on student intent. For example, the “Clone”, which involves word-for-word copying, is the most severe, while a “Remix” that paraphrases from multiple sources isn’t considered quite as egregious.

According to Turnitin’s spectrum, I’d say Ms. Trump’s speech fell somewhere between “CTRL-C” (contains significant portions of text from a single source without alterations) and “Find-Replace” (changing key words and phrases but retaining the essential content of the source). For Turnitin’s take on the speech, read their blog post.

Some people say there’s a fine line between plagiarizing and being inspired by another’s work, and there may be some truth to that. But it’s up to each of us to ensure what we write is original.

How do you ensure your writing doesn’t cross the line from inspiration to plagiarism?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *