How to Get Published Without Really Writing
Categories: In the News , Nonfiction
Having taught English comp for 18 years, I've seen plenty of plagiarism, and more so since the Internet. In the old days, you'd have to go to the library and find the journal or book the student used--often tedious work (see The Mark Twain Murders, by Edith Skom). Catching plagiarists is pretty easy now.
It's easy to see why comp students steal their papers (although it's still not considered best practice). Other cases are less understandable, and the library has two good books that discuss plagiarism's mysteries. In Words for the Taking: the Hunt for a Plagiarist, Neal Bowers, Iowa State poet and English professor, discovered during the '90s that someone was stealing his poems, changing the titles and first few lines, and then submitting them to literary journals. Bowers hired a not-terribly-useful lawyer and very good private investigator to track down the perpetrator. Eventually Bowers discovered that plagiarism was the least of David Jones's crimes.
Disturbingly, other editors and writers found Bowers's hunt for the plagiarist extreme and even peculiar. Bowers finally contacted the plagiarist, who gave no reason for his acts and eventually may have moved to Germany and turned his typing skills to fiction, sending a copy of an Ethan Canin story to The Atlantic, which had originally published the story.
Non-psychotic plagiarizers often attribute their thefts to "bad notes," says Thomas Mallon in Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. Mallon also mentions that professors are often strangely reticent about openly accusing each other of plagiarism even in really egregious cases. This amusing book gives particular attention to the art of plagiarism throughout history.
Here are some sites related to recent or famous plagiarism instances:
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