Jan 09 2008
Plague-arism
I hear there’s yet another author who has cut and pasted chunks of someone else’s writing into hers. I hear the excuse this time was something like “It’s research about the spotted pygmy thief rat. It’s not like I ripped off a real writer.”
I’m not going to get into the moral and legal wrongness of plagiarism, which is being done by people far more knowledgeable than I regarding morals and laws. I’m not going to protest for the poor guy who spent ten years of his life camped out in the godforsaken wildnerness studying the spotted pygmy thief rat, five years organizing the accumulated data into a comprehensible format, made $2 in royalties for fifteen years of work, and then gets slapped in the face because it’s okay to steal his work because he’s not an exalted writer of fiction.
Instead, I’m going to teach you proper note-taking technique. It’s easy. I learned it in third grade. There’s really only one rule you need to know.
Never copy a complete sentence.
Here is an example of some of my djinn research that I ultimately discarded because I didn’t like it or need it. (I’d love to show you the scribbly original, but my scanner doesn’t work with Vista.)
djinn (race) — djinni (one)
have tribes of 7 w/king — king controlled by angel — angel’s name torture to the tribe
controlled by humans — see Sulieman (scribbled on top of) Solomon — by magically binding to objects
to enslave — know name, have item or piece of djinn (hair)
There are lines shooting all over the place, linking miscellaneous related and contradictory snippets from a variety of sources. There isn’t a sentence to be found anywhere in this folder. In order to make any sense of it, I would have to write a sentence, all by myself, using at least several of my own words.
Now, if you want really advanced note-taking techniques, you use your own words even when jotting down the non-complete sentences that are your notes, and then when you compose a sentence based upon those notes, the chances of producing an Eerily Similar Sentence are astronomically low, and in that case alone, I might buy an “oops, it was an accident.”
Otherwise, there’s no excuse, it’s not okay, and you are a thief and should be punished accordingly.
Loading ...
9/30
11/4
11/4
11/25