Plagiarism
Published by Deanna Hoak August 10th, 2006 in blogSomeone e-mailed me in regard to the recent plagiarism scandal and asked if plagiarism is something a copyeditor checks for.
If a passage in a novel I’m copyediting seems too familiar, I certainly do try to make sure that it hasn’t been plagiarized. (I have a bizarrely good memory for text, and I fret even in my own writing that I’ll inadvertently use something my brain has assimilated from elsewhere; I don’t think all plagiarism is intentional.)
One recent novel I copyedited had a sentence that I felt certain came almost verbatim from a recent movie, so I looked up a transcript of the movie in question and searched it. I was wrong about the wording; it was only the sentiment that was the same, which is fine. That novel also had a passage that I believe was intended as an homage to a much earlier work, because it was a twist on a fairly famous scene from it; I looked up that scene to be sure they weren’t too similar. (They weren’t–I fret about a lot of things that probably don’t need it, but I am sometimes right. :-))
I assume that editors and agents do the same thing. Obviously, though, we haven’t read every book out there or seen every movie or TV show that lines could have been stolen from. What seems familiar to one person may not cause a blip on someone else’s radar, which is another good reason to have many eyes on every project.
15 Responses to “Plagiarism”
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I'm a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels I have copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 I was short-listed for a World Fantasy Award for my copyediting.
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I’ve been to a con where the panel plays “Which Line is Mine.” The host reads a couple of lines and the authors on the panel have to guess which one of them wrote it. Quite often the author who wrote the line guesses incorrectly, especially if they have a large body of work.
If these people can’t remember stuff they’ve written themselves, it’s not too hard to believe they could unintentionally plagiarize someone else’s work.
Not to mention parallel evolution; I wrote an article for an online magazine (www.sjgames.com/pyramid) which many readers assumed was inspired by Firefly. Er, nope. Haven’t seen a bit of it. Virtually all of it came from logic and stuff we’d done long ago in a homebrew RPG setting…
I’ve caught plagiarism twice: once, many years ago, I was copyediting a book on a certain type of bird, and I wanted to fact-check some things. I checked out of the library one of the best-known works on that bird, and discovered paragraphs lifted verbatim.
More recently, I went online to see if I could track down the wording of a quotation (or maybe it was spelling–I don’t remember now). Again, I discovered material identical to what I was copyediting.
I think the Internet is making at least some plagiarism both easier to do and easier to catch.
In my work for the government, I come across a lot of policy lingo, which is a dialect all its own. Sometimes if phrasing seems particularly awkward, I will look it up. Recently I found a briefing document for one of our Cabinet members had language, verbatim, unattributed, from a speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Certainly nothing anyone would get sued over, but it could be the source of unneeded embarassment, which is always a joy in diplomacy.
“(I have a bizarrely good memory for text, and I fret even in my own writing that I’ll inadvertently use something my brain has assimilated from elsewhere; I don’t think all plagiarism is intentional.)”
See, that part there is what scares the living hell out of me! I have the same kind of memory and I worry all the time that I’m accidentally lifting something almost verbatim without even realizing it. When Kaavya got in trouble, I was one of the few people I knew who said, “I can totally see how she could do this and not even realize it.”
At the risk of having tomatoes thrown my way, I’ll say that I still believe that’s a possibility. (Not a likelihood — just a possibility.)
I guess all I can do is hope that I’ll have always have copyeditors with your level of conscientious dedication to watch my back. :)
Barry
I guess I just don’t get it.
Certainly, there is some sense in lifting passages from a factual bird book or a diplomatic breifing. It saves time on the part of the ‘author’. In this case you could suppose that plagiarism is just the height of efficient writing.
But what’s the point of lifting scenes out of a fictional story?
“Hmmm, my characters are going into an abandonned mine…seems like I read something like that somewhere…oh wait, I think Tolkien did something with a bunch of guys entering a mine…I’ll just use that and change the names.”
Seems like it would be more work to write up to the stolen passage and then back out again into your story than it would be to just right it your own damn self.
And, am I nuts or does ‘plagiarism’ really need that first ‘i’?
And, of course, part of our job is to look for copyrighted material for permissions issues. And that includes unattributed copyrighted stuff.
Which is why when the novel I was copy editing a few weeks ago had a scene where a character danced to an unidentified song, and interspersed a paragraph of action with a few lines of the song, back and forth for a couple of pages, I went right to Google. A search of a few phrases quickly revealed that the author had quoted, without any attribution, the entire lyrics to a Janet Jackson. (So had the various Websites I used to identify it, of course, but that’s not my problem…)
A couple of years ago, I was copy editing a nonfiction music book. To fact-check some stuff, I of course went first to allmusic.com, which revealed that the author had more or less quoted verbatim from…a bunch of allmusic.com entries. Dude, at least plagiarize from something obscure. I believe that book was canceled by the publisher.
Any who hasn’t read Spider Robinson’s short story “Melancholy Elephants” ought to, for an interesting take on copyright and plagarism.
Where, in your view, is the line between plagiarism and allusion? I spent a long time working in academia, and I’ve dealt with student plagiarism and university plagiarism policy a lot. My sense, though, is that the publishing industry’s lines are not in exactly the same places.
The current draft of my current project has an allusion I initially thougt of as obvious, to a poem so famous that nobody could possibly mistake my allusion for theft. (What can I say? I spent five years writing a dissertation on modernist poetry, and I’m still recovering from the damage to my sense of social context.) Some of my beta readers have complimented me on the allusion, not recognizing a source I thought everybody got in high school.
If I throw in seven words of an Ezra Pound lyric and am cheerfully willing to point anyone who asks to the source of those seven words, but don’t flag them as his within the text, is anybody in the industry going to care?
Barry: I was one of the other few, though once I saw the extent (multiple instances of whole paragraphs, IIRC), I was more dubious. But as Douglas noted, it would be more trouble to look those up than write your own, so it seems less likely that someone would plagiarize intentionally.
Robert, I’ve caught exactly the same thing (with a different singer). Lyrics can be tricky.
Mentalwasteland: I haven’t read that story. I’ll have to look it up.
Dr. Pretentious: That’s tricky. If the song was prior to 1922, it may be out of copyright now, so that you at least wouldn’t have to seek permission; even if it isn’t out of copyright, I suspect seven words would fall under “fair use.” (I’m not a lawyer and don’t know the rules, which change periodically anyway; I flag what seems worrisome because publishers do have people who specialize in these issues and can gauge them more accurately than I can. ) Do you use quote marks around the allusion? You probably should.
Thanks much. He wrote it in 1913, so perhaps I could just mention it in the acknowledgements without having to contact the Pound estate. They have a reputation for being reasonable about granting permission, but it’s nice to have one thing less to do.
Yes, 1913 is definitely out of copyright; you don’t need permission.
Deanna, “Melancholy Elephants” won the Hugo for best short story in ‘83, and the entire story is online here.
Yeah, once the examples started piling on, my conviction that she was just a kid who’d screwed up without realizing it began to waver. But to this day there’s this part of me that thinks it’s still possible she did it unintentionally. People tend to underestimate the combination of unconscious recall and desperation. :)
Mentalwasteland: Thanks for the link!
Barry: Yeah, I know. Having that kind of memory can be scary at times.