16 ms·

Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay

218 points by notmysql_ 4y ago

eganist 4y ago
> What does upset me is a simple fact: No one contacted me about this. > Not Bello herself, not the staff at LitHub, not the journalist who wrote the Gawker piece and not even any of the readers of that piece. While I clearly found it fine on my own, the fact that there has been zero outreach is, in a word, surprising. Because few people care about the victim, and everyone seems to obsess over the perpetrator. I don't know how well the far more severe crimes in our society map in this context, but at least with serial or spree killings, there's an effort to take attention away from the perpetrator due to media fixation on them and instead redirecting it towards healing the injuries (https://www.dontnamethem.org/ https://www.dontnamethem.org/). I don't think it's exactly 1 for 1, but I think the sociological mechanics are probably the same here: If it's not local to the reader, the reader is more likely to be fascinated by the perpetrator rather than go out of their way to heal the injured, or learn from the happening in any tangible way.
- dannyobrien 4y ago
  Ian Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame) once described this to me as "Journalists pick up the phone": which is to say, if you're claiming to be committing journalism, you call (or message) everyone that you're talking about -- for comment, for their side of the story, to correct or challenge your facts. It's pretty unpleasant and chastening a lot of the time, and you have to develop a hard skin for cold-calling and being blown off, or having people vent at you. But if you don't do it, you don't know all the angles, and you haven't finished your job.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  I was thinking today about George Floyd when there was a phenomenon of people calling Derek Chauvin's trial the "George Floyd trials". I wonder if the "Say His Name" protests actually caused that to happen since it was a rare case where we heard George Floyd's name so much he became the main character of that story in our minds.
  - cafard 4y ago
    Well, I certainly don't remember the names of the officers tried in the beating of Rodney King: there were several of them.
    - bin_bash 4y ago
      That's a fair point, of course this was an extemporaneous thought—not a researched idea that I had.
      - cafard 4y ago
        I think that in many cases the victim's name gets remembered. The Atlantic has an article in the current issue mentioning Medgar Evers. As it happens, I do remember the name of the man who shot Evers, was acquitted then and convicted thirty or forty years later. But I have to fish in my memory for it. I certainly don't remember the names of the Manson adherents who killed Sharon Tate, a bit later in the 1960s.
        zrobotics 4y ago
        A counterpoint though, I certainly remember the names of many of the American mass shooters and almost none of their victims.
        cafard 4y ago
        Any interesting point, though at the moment I can't get past Whitman, whose crime occurred almost 60 years ago. So is that one remembers the side with fewer names?
  - yes_i_can 4y ago
    It's something of a double-edged sword because, naturally, "George Floyd trials" made it sound like George Floyd was the person on trial.
    - 4y ago
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  Society, as with other forms of cheating, is the real victim of plagiarism.
- infotecht 4y ago
  I have definitely noticed the perpetrator fixation; I always thought it was an attempt to respect the privacy of the families rather than obsession. But in this specific case -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- could the lack of contact to the victim be a result of there being no citation, instead? Not enough people knowing who the victim was, perhaps in combination with the bystander effect? I have no experience in the industry so I don't know if it'd be likely, but it seems plausible.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    In order to call it plagiarism in print without risk of libel, you have to be able to identify what was plagiarized. Unless it was published anonymously, that means you know from whom it was stolen.
- jjulius 4y ago
  It's further interesting because Gawker went as far as to edit their original piece, at the end of it, to mention that he reached out to them to clarify that he wrote both pieces himself. They don't even include a link to his piece on Plagiarism Today about the issue, despite linking to LitHub's statement about the issue in a separate edit.
- ajb 4y ago
  TBH this is because the main victim of plagiarism is usually not the original author. The usual case is some student doing it to gain a qualification, and the victims are the people who trust that the qualification was obtained honestly and the other students who took the time to do honest work only to be out competed by someone more "productive". There, the person copied probably does not know or care. Here, where it's done in a published work, the original author can be aggrieved that they didn't get a citation (or in rare cases, royalties) but mostly it's the publisher and readers who are being let down. I guess the main case where there is a serious injury to the original author is where they were not famous and the plagiarist is, and the original author gets suspected of being the plagiarist
- collegeburner 4y ago
  I saw a meme the other day that joked that we'd have a lot less if we called them things like "The Small PP Killer". Probably true.
password4321 4y ago
TL;DR: Author who earns a living documenting plagiarism commits to care more about the victims of plagiarism in the future after becoming one and discovering firsthand how little their side of the story is covered. Am I getting that right?
- mdoms 4y ago
  No.
  - dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop. A partial list was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191945, and you've continued to break the site guidelines a lot since then. That's seriously uncool. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  >> Am I getting that right? Yes, pretty much. And in the interest of adding a further meta-layer, your synopsis might have benefitted from an unattributed paraphrased section from the article.
- burnished 4y ago
  I think that was more of a foot note, that section of the article could have been cut and the rest would stand. So, not really the TL;DR?
zw123456 4y ago
I heard about this on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" show on NPR last weekend https://www.npr.org/programs/wait-wait-dont-tell-me/ https://www.npr.org/programs/wait-wait-dont-tell-me/ in the fool the listener segment, probably because it was so unbelievable.
- dhosek 4y ago
  Since my Twitterverse is all writers, there was a lot of talk about this. The Arby’s thing was half-true and would have fooled me if this story wasn’t the actual answer.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
There's a good post-mortem of the whole brew-ha-ha on his blog, also
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  brouhaha (it's French, although nobody knows what it originally means)
  - rendall 4y ago
    I really like that eggcorn! I might spell brouhaha as 'brew-ha-ha' from now on, deliberately. When corrected, I'll link to this comment.
  - wly_cdgr 4y ago
    merci
renewiltord 4y ago
Written text quotations are so overly intrusive into prose. I'm totally onboard with wholesale sampling and remixing of other texts, but it is essential to provide a footnote marker on the text or something. Personally, I love All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan and like the Jimi Hendrix version. And I love all these EDM remixes of the old classics. Losing my Religion hits different when it's powered by a sick beat. Anyway, if there was just some pleasant way to remix by just sticking them in a chapter footnote or a page footnote rather than having to explicitly say "It's a lie to make up a text like BLOCKQUOTE As Ursula Le Guin says BLOCKQUOTE The moon is a harsh mistress is a terrible book especially when Heinlein says BLOCKQUOTE There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him"
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  You are supposed cite paraphrasings. If I say "A key concept in the philosophy of Existentialism is that awareness of one's own free is an uncomfortable experience, characterized by the three feelings of despair, forelorness, and anguish", then I should have an in-text citation (a footnote in the Chicago style, one of those parentheticals in MLA) referring to Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism essay.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
> Bello was a hotly anticipated new author that was preparing to publish her first book I don't know anything about the inner workings of the biz. How does someone who hasn't published her first book yet become hotly anticipated? I get the second book being hotly anticipated, but the first?
- samatman 4y ago
  The short answer is Twitter. It's the long answer as well.
- forbiddenvoid 4y ago
  Many first time novelists already have a track record of publishing poetry and short stories in smaller publications. It's often the way novelists are able to attract an agent, and by extension a publishing contract. At that point the 'anticipation' is often just the effect of the publisher's marketing efforts.
- verve_rat 4y ago
  That was my first question too. I guess samatman is probably correct, this is what the old boys club looks like when it is not just old and boys. We are not part of the "in" group, so we just don't see the noise.
- tiahura 4y ago
  By checking boxes.
- dhosek 4y ago
  A lot of uninformed answers about this question. The process of getting a first novel published goes something like this (I'm eliding a lot of the hard work involved to be able to answer the question and failure to progress can happen at any stage of the process): 1. Write the book 2. Query agents until someone agrees to represent you. 3. After development work between agent and author,¹ the agent will then shop the work around to one or more editors at publishing houses. 4. If multiple editors are interested in purchasing the work, there can either be an auction where they bid to publish the work or an editor can issue what’s called a pre-empt where before it can go to auction, they’ll offer a large advance hoping to guarantee their house gets the book. It’s the multiple editors interested in the work that generates most of the pre-publication buzz for a debut author. Yes, it can help to have published some prominent short works before the first novel, but it’s exceedingly rare for someone to gain much notice from this. Outside of a very short list of prominent magazines (the big national mags: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s plus a very short list of smaller publication The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s), the sad truth is that most of the readers of literary magazines are writers² and maybe literary agents scouting for new talent.³ When someone without at least an agent if not a previously published book has a story in The New Yorker, it’s a major event which was at least in part why “Cat People” was such a big deal when it was published a couple years back. ⸻ 1. Starting in the 80s, this has become increasingly where a lot of editorial work on fiction happens. 2. This is the big conundrum for publishers of said magazines and a generally unspoken but widely acknowledged reality. I have an incubating project that will maybe with a few years’ of cultivation, expose a small number of non-writers to some of the best stuff available online. 3. The magazines that agents look at is not much longer than the first list. Looking at the table of contents of the past few years’ Best American Short Stories will surface almost all of the magazines in agents’ reading lists.
klodolph 4y ago
The story about how Jumi Bello ended up plagiarizing her way through college and a Iowa Writer’s Workshop fellowship is interesting. Her debut novel and subsequent apology were not her first time plagiarizing. She reportedly plagiarized during college, but was able to manipulate people into letting her get away with it. It would have been better to fail fast, fail early, recover soon, than to get away with plagiarism until this late in the game and then get caught so publicly.
- pc86 4y ago
  Better for whom? Plagiarism is a pretty serious offense, and being willing to do it (whether you're a college "kid" or not) says something striking about your character, and something that I think should follow you for a long, long time, especially if you are trying to make a living in writing/publishing.
  - Aditya_Garg 4y ago
    Probably better for the perpetrator. If you think stealing is good idea, its better to learn that its not by getting caught stealing something small when you're young, than to be successful at it initially and getting caught later when the stakes are higher. ^That's a terribly written sentence but at least its not plagiarized
    - cat_plus_plus 4y ago
      If someone just made a copy of my car without depriving me of the original, I wouldn't be THAT mad.
      - tpxl 4y ago
        It's not the copy that's the problem, it's the lack of citation.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - 4y ago
honkler 4y ago
The fact that people care more about the perpetrators of plagiarism, than it's victim tells me it's not really a crime. Think about it. If you saw someone holding a blood-covered knife in their hand, and an angry look on their face, you would be able to guess he/she committed a murder. But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered? But this does not seem to be the case with plagiarism. Perhaps because victim is not really the victim. It's just a way for people to obtain some schadenfreude. In the same way that the mob involved in a mob lynching does not do it for victim, or "justice", but plainly to get pleasure out of the act.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  >But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered? Actually, no! Stories about murderers track way higher in news media than stories about the murdered. Especially when it's a particularly heinous spree killing.
harry8 4y ago
"Victim" is an interesting word to use here. Is the author really a "victim?" I don't see how they have been hurt but can see how they have been helped by being plagiarised. I can see how someone stealing work and claiming it as their own and accepting the rewards of money & status they did not earn can cause someone to be a victim. > I got an alert from WordPress that my site stats were “booming”. Doesn't seem like it here. Plagiarize! Let noone else's work evade your eyes. [1] [1] Plagiarised because I'm not telling you where it's from. Wooo.
- thetadot 4y ago
  "Victim" of plagiarism should include the misled readers who are denied the context of the original work and the source, possibly to read further later.
  - harry8 4y ago
    Sure. But that is not how the word "victim" is being used in the piece. I can see how the plagiarised person can be a victim, as I've said. Such a person could be deprived of money and status that is their due while it is garnered by the plagiarist. Morally that is straight up theft, for mine. I just don't see it, or much like it here. This is not a defense of plagiarisim that I'm making. It's not a massive point and it definitely isn't terribly important. I just feel like it's describing yourself as a victim of theft if someone tries to break into your car, does no damage to it, fails to steal anything and accidentally leaves a few hundred dollar bills behind that are legally awarded to you as their finder. Victim? Maybe a professional writer could use a word to convey the meaning they're trying to convey without the nuance I'm objecting to here? Has there ever been an easier case to "refuse to be a victim" than this one? The plagiarised party is, in some small way, cashing in on the experience and good luck to them! Seems like the plagiarist is getting some kind of justice and everyone can form their own view on the appropriateness of its roughness and whether no viable alternative to it exists and so on in the all the usual ways. [1] Tom Lehrer for anyone playing along at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E
22c 4y ago
I'm not sure if it's some sort of anti-plagiarism fingerprinting technique, but this article reads as though random words have been deleted from it. > “I’m interested stories of redemption…” (I checked the source and there is an 'in' in the original.) > that seemed to be very what this essay was about > essay is over 4,500 long. > writing process wasn’t the focus essay > focuses heavily on the struggles of her over the year
- Thorrez 4y ago
  What's funny is I read the entire article and didn't notice any of those. Although I don't think that last one is an example of a missing word. It's awkwardly phrased, but the grammar still works AFAICT.
- throwanem 4y ago
  I find I do that when my speed of thought outpaces my rate of typing. I "know" the words are there in that they're part of the sentence I intend to type, but I'm not closely enough attending what my hands are typing to notice they didn't come out.
  - ohazi 4y ago
    This is why we proofread?
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Eh. I'm sure this isn't the only place this author writes, and I suppose Stalin's maxim may apply.
      - blondin 4y ago
        incidentally, chrome has an integrated proofreader now! i was pleasantly surprised when i saw the feature. doubly so when it said it's the same one gmail uses.
      - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Most worthless obsession in the world. Imitation is the best form of flattery. If the issue is royalties/grants/ego, these days ML systems can easily detect significant copying and auto-attach credits. If you are riled up by a middle school student copying a paragraph of your prose for an assignment, get a grip!
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  It's about intellectual honesty. It should be unambiguous what parts of a creative work are actually your creativity, and what parts are borrowed from others. Besides that, citations make a great way to pursue further reading. If an interesting idea gets mentioned in passing in an essay I'm reading, then if it's cited I can go read that other work. That's why you're supposed to cute your own works, when an idea in a given essay is just lifted from something else you wrote. I, as a reader, can then go check out that work, and in turn be lead to the ideas that helped shape that one by the citations in that work.
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  > these days ML systems can easily detect significant copying and auto-attach credits. I don't know if you used google in the past, like, 5 years, but it proves this statement trivially false.
rasengan0 4y ago
>That is not how writing works, and it is an idea Bello needs to disabuse herself of. [1] It's refreshing to see a lack of critique or commentary to the above statement with regards to gender, race, mental status, or any other categorization. But plagiarism does not appear to be a universal violation of ethics when discovered. [2] [1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/09/plagiarism-today-plagiarized-in-a-plagiarism-atonement-essay/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/09/plagiarism-today-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
rpmisms 4y ago
I can't imagine writing in the style that the guilty party utilizes. If I am writing a piece, it's either soulless corporate drivel or something I genuinely care about. My substack is not high-quality, but it's definitely me. I've never copy-pasted something there that wasn't in a block quote. Just sits wrong that it's possible for people to do that and feel good about it.
freeopinion 4y ago
Completely unrelated plagiarism story: Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam. The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.
- mdonahoe 4y ago
  Another unrelated story: A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top. I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    I once graded an assignment handed in that still had hotlinks in blue underlined text from copy and pasting.
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      In the 90s, I remember there being a piece of student work pinned to the public display board (this only happened to the best work). It had blue links in it. Either the teacher who marked and choose it had no clue what that meant or had no fucks to give, not sure which.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      We used to rick roll teachers by pretending to copy paste from the internet by writing "Please click here for more information" somewhere in the text. I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.
sircastor 4y ago
This is adjacent, but I’ve wondered how close we are to having these automated plagiarism detection systems start identifying large numbers of false positives. Especially as they adopt machine learning, and they let their fuzzy matches get a little more aggressive. Part of the problem with plagiarism in the abstract is that much of the work being submitted is not novel. Every one of us has been taught to read something, and then regurgitate it in a mildly different form to prove our successful learning of it. And our schools are spending tax dollars to buy access to these systems.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Back in my high school days we used a platform called TurnItIn which gave our writing a 'plagarism score'-too high and we'd need to rewrite the essay. It would flag silly things like two word fragments sometimes. I remember writing a strenuous objection because the license agreement (which I read because I was a bit of a stallmanite at the time) allowed the platform to publish our writing. In effect, they could supply plagiarism sites and then sell you the solution!
  - tedd4u 4y ago
    Yeah universities use Turnitin, too. “Selling arms to both sides.”
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > This is adjacent, but I’ve wondered how close we are to having these automated plagiarism detection systems start identifying large numbers of false positives. Especially as they adopt machine learning, and they let their fuzzy matches get a little more aggressive. "how close we are" ...? The automated plagiarism engines have always had huge amounts of false positives. Essentially they are only useful for highlighting what they detected. Some of the things that I have seen them false detect: Direct cited quotes, common phrases and sentence structures. Factual explanations, e.g. a description of a specific aperatus which can only really be described in one way (even though exact wording differed). Reference lists, this was by far the most common reason for very high turnitin scores, when I used it turnitin was completely unable to pick up a reference list. The plagiarism scores of these systems are completely useless, I've found obvious plagiarism in work with scores of less than 3% (which is a very common score even if you would write an essay now) while I've had work with scores of >50% which were completely fine. Any teacher who uses the turnitin score for anything should be fired IMO, because they do not understand plagiarism.
macintux 4y ago
> In short, Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago. When I was a teenager I collected a couple of head-scratchers like this. I’d say they were ironic but I’d be afraid of being wrong. First: visited church with my grandparents, received a typewritten postcard a week or two later. Quote: “Thank you for visiting our church last Sinday.” Second: was listening to my favorite radio station, a local university-run station. One of the students who ran it read an editorial about complaints regarding pronunciation. She defended the personalities, said they were after all just students. The irony: she repeatedly mispronounced “mispronunciation”. I was 14 at the time, so didn’t have the courage to call and point that out, but I have to assume someone did.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robocat 4y ago
> At the time, she told herself, “I’m just borrowing and changing the language. I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again.” We are taught how to plagiarise at university; where it is encouraged, and, you are marked on how well you do it. Paraphrasing is demanded of you. Repeating in your own words the content of other sources. Good marks for regurgitating the ideas of others with a false patina of creativity: rephrasing, synthesizing and summarizing your source material. It is a foul process with a false idol at its core: placing dishonest "creativity" on a pedestal, artistic license instead of honest copying of the source material, a sham instead of giving the source proper recognition. The real world mostly values execution, not a conceptual hall of mirrors, not ideas continuously warped and reflected with gross academic variations. Edit: "Plagiarise in your own words (citation please)" would be a way to say it ;-)
- alisonkisk 4y ago
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Hold on, that is not the same thing "rephrasing, synthesizing and summarising your source material" (your words) is not plagiarism and is an important skill and if the source is appropriately given is not plagiarism. Still you are correct plagiarism education is often very bad.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Sentence manipulations can be performed without understanding anything of the material. The end result is the same thing as plagiarism, and isn't an important skill at all except if you try to get credit for work that wasn't yours. Many just spends their entire education getting better and better at transforming sentences and learns a lot of word/sentences equivalencies to take that even further, these are the people who can talk "intelligently" about coding problems without being able to code. Basically human form of GPT3.
    - lmm 4y ago
paulpauper 4y ago
I plagiarized a few times in high school to get out of deadlines for work I didn't care to do. I would copy paste the the essay on Word from a CliffsNotes-type site and rewrite some of it, rearrange some sentences and insert typos to make it look legit. Got As and passed the class. This was a long time ago, before it was possible to easily check this stuff. But in college? no way. they are way smarter at checking that stuff. Considering how much businesses delegate, I don't see the harm of letting people do it it. I think it's only wrong if someone is paying for original content or there is the expectation of original content through the implicit trust between the reader and the writer.
- logifail 4y ago
  > I plagiarized a few times in high school to get out of deadlines for work I didn't care to do. One time pretty much all the kids in my Chemistry class copied my homework, at that time I had the reputation for knowing what I was doing. Unfortunately there was a key error in one of my solutions, and all the other kids copied my solution faithfully - including the error. The teacher figured out pretty quickly what had happened and decided on an unusual reponse. He corrected my solution fully ... in my book. In everyone else's book the only thing he wrote was: "See $logifail's book" We didn't do that again!
  - aspenmayer 4y ago
    I understand now that you meant your answer book for the exam under discussion, but for a moment I imagined that you were saying that you got away with it until much later, when your former professor was reviewing some professional published work of yours after the fact.
    - logifail 4y ago
      :eek: Looking at that again I really didn't choose my words very carefully, sorry. No published books here! Two exceeedingly minor scientific papers, but fortunately my misdeeds in school Chemistry were long forgotten by then. OT but interestingly in German there's a clear distinction in such cases between the word "Buch" (= book, of the sort that you read from) and the word "Heft" (= exercise book, of the soft-bound variety that you write in).
alisonkisk 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
It's a bit ironic how the author talks about how to avoid plagiarism by not copying sections verbatim to later rewrite them, while at the same time the author seems to have done this himself, when taking passages from his history of plagiarism article for a piece he wrote for turnitin. Now he was copying his own words, so the ethics are somewhat murkier. I would still argue it's bad form to do this for a work for hire like the turnitin piece. Moreover it seems he also does not follow his own advice of not taking passages from other texts for later rewriting.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I know it's generally frowned upon to comment on voting, but can someone explain why the downvotes? I'm really trying to understand what in the above warranted to be voted down. I've noticed that there has been much more downvoting recently. The weird thing is that often posts a few levels down, in both sides of a discussion would get downvoted even though they seemed to make perfectly fine arguments (that I might have agreed or disagreed with). It almost feels like there is some bots that randomly apply votes in discussions.
  - idontknowmyacc 4y ago
    Yeah they are bots really. Humans bots. 90% of population of whatever forum, pages, etc.How in the hell is plagiarism to "copy" ideas? Those people never have been read Sh.?
aaron695 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
I would argue that Tools like turnitin et al and their use of a "plagiarism score" are at least partially to blame. Teachers already in high-school seem to often tell students to self check and that "a score above 20" (arbitrary number) will result in a fail, as if some percentage of plagiarism is ok. I was shocked when I took over a thesis course and students were asking what was the acceptable score. They also told me that students had failed previously due to a too high score because turnitin picked up the reference list as plagiarised. Now this is clearly the fault of teachers, but the increasing demands on them, plus the turnitin advertising to easy the burden by making this score is also partly to blame IMO.
- SCLeo 4y ago
  I didn't even know it is possible to reliability get turnitin scores to be lower than 20. It always marks my entire references section as plagerized, resulting a score of 20%-30%.
trevcanhuman 4y ago
It just baffles how much effort as humans of modern education and academia have put into being super mad for using other people's ideas. Sure, I agree that this guy is somewhat the victim and she shouldn't have done that. But really, how is it that we've come so far as a society and just scream at things like these ? Isn't knowledge supposed to be shared ? Even if it's not properly attributed ? There are plenty of misattributions in Mathematics, theorems who people did not create or develop at all, yet their name has been recited for years and years in elementary and middle schools. Yet teachers will say that plagiarism is bad! But hey, don't worry if we call this theorem like this because this is ok and it's actually not plagiarism. We're literally just regurgitating ideas, as several commenters have said (good luck getting the primary sources for my comment lol). Also, should my ideas be considered plagiarized even when I thought of them before someone else published them ? Interesting dilema, at least for me.
- thisNeeds2BeSad 4y ago
  Maybe use plagiarism to detect influence of thought & ideas as trees instead and reward accordingly? Problem is though, that rewards self-promoters instead of rigorous scientists.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    Congratulations, you've reinvented citations. Paper A cites papers B, C, and E, which in turn cite F, etc.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  In an academic context, plagarism enforcement is less about the theft of ideas (which are no less stolen when simply regurgitated with a citation next to them), than as it is about establishing a chain of influence. If I write an article that uses someone else's ideas, then I cite them, so that a reader can go "huh, that idea's interesting, let me go see where that came from" and then they can see what influenced those ideas by that papers citations and so on and so on. The fact that students don't have this concept of intellectual chain of custody hammered into their skulls is a failure of the education system. Citing quotes is obvious, but in this day and age it's probably the least necessary. I can Google an exact quote and find exactly the article it came from. Much harder to search is provinance of paraphrased idea or general concept, or the source of a factual statement that I find dubious.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
My opposite of plagiarism anecdote, where I still didn't do the work but got credit for it. When I went to High School in Utah it was after going to a really advanced Junior High in Oregon, and I was very spoiled and felt that the work was boring and beneath me. One of the classes I took I should have been grateful for as a dream class for a kid like me, it was a class on reading Science Fiction and Fantasy where you had to write a book report on the books read (once a week, once every two weeks? don't remember, maybe once per month). I generally read a book every day or two, and I wrote quite quickly so it shouldn't have been difficult. But I found these book reports difficult to write because they had a template for how they wanted the reports written that I found insulting to the books I had read, if I had read a book I liked I didn't want to insult it that way, and if I read a book I didn't like I didn't want to think about it any more. So I hit on the expedient solution of writing book reports on fake books, I don't remember any of the books other than one that was a stereotypical Fantasy quest to stop the dark lord thing, called "The Hinterlands of Horlon" ugh, of course I gave it a negative review with some bright spots just keep anyone from being interested in reading it. Didn't get found out though.
- zw123456 4y ago
  Ever consider actually writing one of your fake books now and bringing it to fruition?
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    Well, since I wrote essays saying the books sucked to make sure that nobody would think, damn, I gotta read that book - no. Although I do have some books I have written there is not much money in being an author unless one succeeds wildly and so I have not put the effort into publication as that is not the interesting part of writing.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Reminds me of this sketch by Fairbairn Films, "When you write a report on a book you never read" https://youtu.be/XB2j8oBddbw https://youtu.be/XB2j8oBddbw
- 4y ago
isaacfrond 4y ago
I'm not sure, we need to get worked up about his. An actual example of the so-called plagiarizing is given here: https://www.gawker.com/media/jumi-bellos-lithub-essay-about-plagiarism-looks-very-plagiarized https://www.gawker.com/media/jumi-bellos-lithub-essay-about-... In Bello’s article, for example, she wrote the following: Plagiarism has been with us since the birth of language and art. For as long as there have been words to be read, there has been someone there copying the passages. It goes as far back as 8 AD with the poet Martial who caught another poet Fidentinus reciting his work. He called Fidentinus a plagiarus, meaning a “kidnapper.” Compare that to this 2011 article in Plagiarism Today, titled “The World’s First ‘Plagiarism’ Case.” Plagiarism, the act of taking another’s work and passing it off as your own, has almost certainly been with us since the dawn of artwork and written language. For as long as there has been art and artists, there have been people who have put their name to it incorrectly. But while the act of plagiarism is as old as time, the word “plagiarism” is not. The etymology of the word plagiarism is an interesting one and its history actually dates back to the first century AD and involves a Roman poet and his literary “kidnappers” who became the subject of a literary beating.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  I'm confused. That is not plagiarism at all. The facts included are the same, but they are written completely differently.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    Yea, it's paraphrasing. But it's still a terrible way to write. Bello's version even contradicts itself giving 8 AD as the beginning of plagiarism, not the origin of the word. That's what happens when you paraphrase by reshuffling the words instead of creating new writing from the information that's in your head.
    - drakonka 4y ago
      Paraphrasing can for sure be a very common form of plagiarism[0][1] [0] https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/is-paraphrasing-considered-plagiarism/ https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/is-paraph... [1] https://law-richmond.libguides.com/c.php?g=998384&p=7227189 https://law-richmond.libguides.com/c.php?g=998384&p=7227189
kieckerjan 4y ago
Trigger warning: shameless (but pertinent) brag coming up. In my first year of college I had to write a short essay for an English course. I was rather lazy as well as a fan of wordplay so I wrote an essay describing the life and work of an obscure 19th-century philosopher, who also happened to be completely fictional. Since I could just pull the "facts" out of my ass, it was easy to write. A week later I was called in by the English department and had a sit down with two grim looking teachers. They confronted me with suspicions of plagiarism. Most of their case was built on my use of the word "gamut", which they thought a 19-year-old non-native speaker was not supposed to know. I was incensed (as well as flattered), but they only relented after I pointed out that the essay was an acrostic. The first letters of the paragraphs spelled the word "humbug".
- jokowueu 4y ago
  Haha . What was their reaction ?!
  - kieckerjan 4y ago
    I made the grade.
- carlob 4y ago
  This is something most people who have never learnt a foreign language don't get, but usually the fancier the word sounds, the more likely it comes straight from Greek or Latin and to be pretty much the same in your native language. For example: a native Italian speaker who is not very fluent in English will first think of velocity rather than speed, because speed is velocità in Italian.
  - noneeeed 4y ago
    Also, I've found that many non-english speakers learn a lot of their vocabulary from written sources, and so use "fancier" words than many of us native speakers would. It reminds me of time a colleague was on the bus. Someone pressed the bell to stop when they didn't mean to. A voice with a strong foreign accent piped up from the back "I apologies, I depressed the indicator but do not wish to alight". It was absolutely perfect english that no native speaker would utter. I always struggled with the formal and informal forms in French and later when I was trying to learn Japanes, and tended to err on the side of the formal, so I'm sure I'd have sounded similar.
dariosalvi78 4y ago
while it is clear that Bello borrowed the text from the blog, she did paraphrase it to a good degree. I struggle to call it plagiarism, but, yes, I would have definitely cited the original source. The thing with plagiarism is that it's either (almost) verbatim or it's not plagiarism, because, otherwise, everything is plagiarism. That's how culture and ideas work.
- mkl 4y ago
  What makes it plagiarism is passing it off as your own, i.e. not citing your sources.
- idontknowmyacc 4y ago
  My country's main writer took entirely the V act of Hamlet into their second chapter of his main novel. He's a Nobel, though. That's how culture runs, that how it works. Nobody can master words as Sh did. And he was so good at writing plays if and only if someone else wrote that play before, at least as a tale.
- idontknowmyacc 4y ago
  Elliot, on the other hand, likes to say where a line in his poem comes from. WTF man, I'll never read you if I didn't know.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  That is incorrect in an academic context. Obviously different contexts have different expectations of citation and attribution, but plagarism is not just about infringing someone's copyright by stealing their work verbatim. It's about misrepresenting someone else's ideas/research/analysis as your own. I can restate Plato's model of concrete things being mere shadows of abstract ideals however I damn well please, but if I don't mention that I got that idea from Plato, it's still plagarism.
bloak 4y ago
A very common form of plagiarism on the Internet is people copying transcriptions of public-domain works without mentioning where they copied them from. You know it's happening because you see the same transcription errors repeated on dozens of web sites. (Of course there is no copyright violation here.) A very common case of copying without attribution is in contracts and policies, which are nearly always adapted from existing documents. Probably this doesn't count as plagiarism because nobody expects these things to be original, authors are not named, and there is no tradition of citing sources. (However, in many cases it probably is copyright violation, even if nobody cares to complain about it.)
Borrible 4y ago
When necessary, I happily plagiarize answers from Stackoverflow the whole day long. However, I shy away from recursive structures. They may be meta and cool but not always efficient. I was once approached by a young job recruiter. Since I am a fan of literary and linguistic issues and he had a master's degree in German studies, I googled for his master's thesis. Interesting topic, which I will leave unnamed here because.... Because I found an Austrian bachelor's thesis posted online ten years before this master's thesis, by a different person but with the same topic. And in my opinion with a quite similar structure and analog passages. Since my interest was piqued, I researched further and found the doctoral thesis of the professor who had supervised the master's thesis. Another twenty years older. It was based on the same book as the master's thesis and the baccalaureate thesis with a broadly related topic, though of course much more in-depth and expanded. Unfortunately, the book was not 'Felix Krull'. All three writings, however, were, in my opinion, excellent in terms of craftsmanship. As Nietzsche taught us, nothing is true everything is permitted.
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taylorius 4y ago
Am resisting the urge to grab someone's comment from here, change a couple of words, and repost it as my own "related plagiarism story". ;-)
kuroguro 4y ago
Self-plagiarizing anecdote: in uni we had a subject called "Technical English" where we had to learn amazing words like "printer" among other things. Obviously nobody took it seriously. About 5 minutes before class I realized a short powerpoint presentation was due that day on some "technical subject". Fortunately our teacher was substituted and we had done a presentation like it before. So I took my last presentation, changed the name to something vaguely different (as I knew it would be written down), repeated my last presentation word for word and no one was the wisest. Saw a few grins as my classmates started realizing what's going on ^^; _edit_ I'm not from an English speaking country in case anyone is wondering.
ghaff 4y ago
One interesting aspect of plagiarism is self-plagiarism which is often OK but sometimes not. Copy over some boilerplate description or background to a new document sure. Even write a book that's draws in part from published blog posts? Sure, as long as you have the copyright. (I once wrote a book that was based in part on reworked blog posts from various places. When I submitted for Kindle, it got flagged. But I submitted some links and everything was OK.) On the other hand, if someone commissions me to write an article on something, I generally speaking shouldn't reuse much directly from past articles.

218 points by notmysql_ 4y ago

> What does upset me is a simple fact: No one contacted me about this. > Not Bello herself, not the staff at LitHub, not the journalist who wrote the Gawker piece and not even any of the readers of that piece. While I clearly found it fine on my own, the fact that there has been zero outreach is, in a word, surprising. Because few people care about the victim, and everyone seems to obsess over the perpetrator. I don't know how well the far more severe crimes in our society map in this context, but at least with serial or spree killings, there's an effort to take attention away from the perpetrator due to media fixation on them and instead redirecting it towards healing the injuries (https://www.dontnamethem.org/ https://www.dontnamethem.org/). I don't think it's exactly 1 for 1, but I think the sociological mechanics are probably the same here: If it's not local to the reader, the reader is more likely to be fascinated by the perpetrator rather than go out of their way to heal the injured, or learn from the happening in any tangible way.

dannyobrien 4y ago
Ian Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame) once described this to me as "Journalists pick up the phone": which is to say, if you're claiming to be committing journalism, you call (or message) everyone that you're talking about -- for comment, for their side of the story, to correct or challenge your facts. It's pretty unpleasant and chastening a lot of the time, and you have to develop a hard skin for cold-calling and being blown off, or having people vent at you. But if you don't do it, you don't know all the angles, and you haven't finished your job.
bin_bash 4y ago
I was thinking today about George Floyd when there was a phenomenon of people calling Derek Chauvin's trial the "George Floyd trials". I wonder if the "Say His Name" protests actually caused that to happen since it was a rare case where we heard George Floyd's name so much he became the main character of that story in our minds.
- cafard 4y ago
  Well, I certainly don't remember the names of the officers tried in the beating of Rodney King: there were several of them.
  - bin_bash 4y ago
    That's a fair point, of course this was an extemporaneous thought—not a researched idea that I had.
    - cafard 4y ago
      I think that in many cases the victim's name gets remembered. The Atlantic has an article in the current issue mentioning Medgar Evers. As it happens, I do remember the name of the man who shot Evers, was acquitted then and convicted thirty or forty years later. But I have to fish in my memory for it. I certainly don't remember the names of the Manson adherents who killed Sharon Tate, a bit later in the 1960s.
      - zrobotics 4y ago
        A counterpoint though, I certainly remember the names of many of the American mass shooters and almost none of their victims.
        cafard 4y ago
        Any interesting point, though at the moment I can't get past Whitman, whose crime occurred almost 60 years ago. So is that one remembers the side with fewer names?
- yes_i_can 4y ago
  It's something of a double-edged sword because, naturally, "George Floyd trials" made it sound like George Floyd was the person on trial.
  - 4y ago
DANK_YACHT 4y ago
Society, as with other forms of cheating, is the real victim of plagiarism.
infotecht 4y ago
I have definitely noticed the perpetrator fixation; I always thought it was an attempt to respect the privacy of the families rather than obsession. But in this specific case -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- could the lack of contact to the victim be a result of there being no citation, instead? Not enough people knowing who the victim was, perhaps in combination with the bystander effect? I have no experience in the industry so I don't know if it'd be likely, but it seems plausible.
- throwanem 4y ago
  In order to call it plagiarism in print without risk of libel, you have to be able to identify what was plagiarized. Unless it was published anonymously, that means you know from whom it was stolen.
jjulius 4y ago
It's further interesting because Gawker went as far as to edit their original piece, at the end of it, to mention that he reached out to them to clarify that he wrote both pieces himself. They don't even include a link to his piece on Plagiarism Today about the issue, despite linking to LitHub's statement about the issue in a separate edit.
ajb 4y ago
TBH this is because the main victim of plagiarism is usually not the original author. The usual case is some student doing it to gain a qualification, and the victims are the people who trust that the qualification was obtained honestly and the other students who took the time to do honest work only to be out competed by someone more "productive". There, the person copied probably does not know or care. Here, where it's done in a published work, the original author can be aggrieved that they didn't get a citation (or in rare cases, royalties) but mostly it's the publisher and readers who are being let down. I guess the main case where there is a serious injury to the original author is where they were not famous and the plagiarist is, and the original author gets suspected of being the plagiarist
collegeburner 4y ago
I saw a meme the other day that joked that we'd have a lot less if we called them things like "The Small PP Killer". Probably true.

password4321 4y ago

TL;DR: Author who earns a living documenting plagiarism commits to care more about the victims of plagiarism in the future after becoming one and discovering firsthand how little their side of the story is covered. Am I getting that right?

mdoms 4y ago
No.
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop. A partial list was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191945, and you've continued to break the site guidelines a lot since then. That's seriously uncool. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
lovemenot 4y ago
>> Am I getting that right? Yes, pretty much. And in the interest of adding a further meta-layer, your synopsis might have benefitted from an unattributed paraphrased section from the article.
burnished 4y ago
I think that was more of a foot note, that section of the article could have been cut and the rest would stand. So, not really the TL;DR?

zw123456 4y ago

I heard about this on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" show on NPR last weekend https://www.npr.org/programs/wait-wait-dont-tell-me/ https://www.npr.org/programs/wait-wait-dont-tell-me/ in the fool the listener segment, probably because it was so unbelievable.

dhosek 4y ago
Since my Twitterverse is all writers, there was a lot of talk about this. The Arby’s thing was half-true and would have fooled me if this story wasn’t the actual answer.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

There's a good post-mortem of the whole brew-ha-ha on his blog, also

thematrixturtle 4y ago
brouhaha (it's French, although nobody knows what it originally means)
- rendall 4y ago
  I really like that eggcorn! I might spell brouhaha as 'brew-ha-ha' from now on, deliberately. When corrected, I'll link to this comment.
- wly_cdgr 4y ago
  merci

renewiltord 4y ago

Written text quotations are so overly intrusive into prose. I'm totally onboard with wholesale sampling and remixing of other texts, but it is essential to provide a footnote marker on the text or something. Personally, I love All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan and like the Jimi Hendrix version. And I love all these EDM remixes of the old classics. Losing my Religion hits different when it's powered by a sick beat. Anyway, if there was just some pleasant way to remix by just sticking them in a chapter footnote or a page footnote rather than having to explicitly say "It's a lie to make up a text like BLOCKQUOTE As Ursula Le Guin says BLOCKQUOTE The moon is a harsh mistress is a terrible book especially when Heinlein says BLOCKQUOTE There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him"

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
You are supposed cite paraphrasings. If I say "A key concept in the philosophy of Existentialism is that awareness of one's own free is an uncomfortable experience, characterized by the three feelings of despair, forelorness, and anguish", then I should have an in-text citation (a footnote in the Chicago style, one of those parentheticals in MLA) referring to Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism essay.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago

> Bello was a hotly anticipated new author that was preparing to publish her first book I don't know anything about the inner workings of the biz. How does someone who hasn't published her first book yet become hotly anticipated? I get the second book being hotly anticipated, but the first?

samatman 4y ago
The short answer is Twitter. It's the long answer as well.
forbiddenvoid 4y ago
Many first time novelists already have a track record of publishing poetry and short stories in smaller publications. It's often the way novelists are able to attract an agent, and by extension a publishing contract. At that point the 'anticipation' is often just the effect of the publisher's marketing efforts.
verve_rat 4y ago
That was my first question too. I guess samatman is probably correct, this is what the old boys club looks like when it is not just old and boys. We are not part of the "in" group, so we just don't see the noise.
tiahura 4y ago
By checking boxes.
dhosek 4y ago
A lot of uninformed answers about this question. The process of getting a first novel published goes something like this (I'm eliding a lot of the hard work involved to be able to answer the question and failure to progress can happen at any stage of the process): 1. Write the book 2. Query agents until someone agrees to represent you. 3. After development work between agent and author,¹ the agent will then shop the work around to one or more editors at publishing houses. 4. If multiple editors are interested in purchasing the work, there can either be an auction where they bid to publish the work or an editor can issue what’s called a pre-empt where before it can go to auction, they’ll offer a large advance hoping to guarantee their house gets the book. It’s the multiple editors interested in the work that generates most of the pre-publication buzz for a debut author. Yes, it can help to have published some prominent short works before the first novel, but it’s exceedingly rare for someone to gain much notice from this. Outside of a very short list of prominent magazines (the big national mags: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s plus a very short list of smaller publication The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s), the sad truth is that most of the readers of literary magazines are writers² and maybe literary agents scouting for new talent.³ When someone without at least an agent if not a previously published book has a story in The New Yorker, it’s a major event which was at least in part why “Cat People” was such a big deal when it was published a couple years back. ⸻ 1. Starting in the 80s, this has become increasingly where a lot of editorial work on fiction happens. 2. This is the big conundrum for publishers of said magazines and a generally unspoken but widely acknowledged reality. I have an incubating project that will maybe with a few years’ of cultivation, expose a small number of non-writers to some of the best stuff available online. 3. The magazines that agents look at is not much longer than the first list. Looking at the table of contents of the past few years’ Best American Short Stories will surface almost all of the magazines in agents’ reading lists.

klodolph 4y ago

The story about how Jumi Bello ended up plagiarizing her way through college and a Iowa Writer’s Workshop fellowship is interesting. Her debut novel and subsequent apology were not her first time plagiarizing. She reportedly plagiarized during college, but was able to manipulate people into letting her get away with it. It would have been better to fail fast, fail early, recover soon, than to get away with plagiarism until this late in the game and then get caught so publicly.

pc86 4y ago
Better for whom? Plagiarism is a pretty serious offense, and being willing to do it (whether you're a college "kid" or not) says something striking about your character, and something that I think should follow you for a long, long time, especially if you are trying to make a living in writing/publishing.
- Aditya_Garg 4y ago
  Probably better for the perpetrator. If you think stealing is good idea, its better to learn that its not by getting caught stealing something small when you're young, than to be successful at it initially and getting caught later when the stakes are higher. ^That's a terribly written sentence but at least its not plagiarized
  - cat_plus_plus 4y ago
    If someone just made a copy of my car without depriving me of the original, I wouldn't be THAT mad.
    - tpxl 4y ago
      It's not the copy that's the problem, it's the lack of citation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago

honkler 4y ago

The fact that people care more about the perpetrators of plagiarism, than it's victim tells me it's not really a crime. Think about it. If you saw someone holding a blood-covered knife in their hand, and an angry look on their face, you would be able to guess he/she committed a murder. But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered? But this does not seem to be the case with plagiarism. Perhaps because victim is not really the victim. It's just a way for people to obtain some schadenfreude. In the same way that the mob involved in a mob lynching does not do it for victim, or "justice", but plainly to get pleasure out of the act.

deleted 4y ago
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kmeisthax 4y ago
>But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered? Actually, no! Stories about murderers track way higher in news media than stories about the murdered. Especially when it's a particularly heinous spree killing.

harry8 4y ago

"Victim" is an interesting word to use here. Is the author really a "victim?" I don't see how they have been hurt but can see how they have been helped by being plagiarised. I can see how someone stealing work and claiming it as their own and accepting the rewards of money & status they did not earn can cause someone to be a victim. > I got an alert from WordPress that my site stats were “booming”. Doesn't seem like it here. Plagiarize! Let noone else's work evade your eyes. [1] [1] Plagiarised because I'm not telling you where it's from. Wooo.

thetadot 4y ago
"Victim" of plagiarism should include the misled readers who are denied the context of the original work and the source, possibly to read further later.
- harry8 4y ago
  Sure. But that is not how the word "victim" is being used in the piece. I can see how the plagiarised person can be a victim, as I've said. Such a person could be deprived of money and status that is their due while it is garnered by the plagiarist. Morally that is straight up theft, for mine. I just don't see it, or much like it here. This is not a defense of plagiarisim that I'm making. It's not a massive point and it definitely isn't terribly important. I just feel like it's describing yourself as a victim of theft if someone tries to break into your car, does no damage to it, fails to steal anything and accidentally leaves a few hundred dollar bills behind that are legally awarded to you as their finder. Victim? Maybe a professional writer could use a word to convey the meaning they're trying to convey without the nuance I'm objecting to here? Has there ever been an easier case to "refuse to be a victim" than this one? The plagiarised party is, in some small way, cashing in on the experience and good luck to them! Seems like the plagiarist is getting some kind of justice and everyone can form their own view on the appropriateness of its roughness and whether no viable alternative to it exists and so on in the all the usual ways. [1] Tom Lehrer for anyone playing along at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E

22c 4y ago

I'm not sure if it's some sort of anti-plagiarism fingerprinting technique, but this article reads as though random words have been deleted from it. > “I’m interested stories of redemption…” (I checked the source and there is an 'in' in the original.) > that seemed to be very what this essay was about > essay is over 4,500 long. > writing process wasn’t the focus essay > focuses heavily on the struggles of her over the year

Thorrez 4y ago
What's funny is I read the entire article and didn't notice any of those. Although I don't think that last one is an example of a missing word. It's awkwardly phrased, but the grammar still works AFAICT.
throwanem 4y ago
I find I do that when my speed of thought outpaces my rate of typing. I "know" the words are there in that they're part of the sentence I intend to type, but I'm not closely enough attending what my hands are typing to notice they didn't come out.
- ohazi 4y ago
  This is why we proofread?
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Eh. I'm sure this isn't the only place this author writes, and I suppose Stalin's maxim may apply.
    - blondin 4y ago
      incidentally, chrome has an integrated proofreader now! i was pleasantly surprised when i saw the feature. doubly so when it said it's the same one gmail uses.
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Most worthless obsession in the world. Imitation is the best form of flattery. If the issue is royalties/grants/ego, these days ML systems can easily detect significant copying and auto-attach credits. If you are riled up by a middle school student copying a paragraph of your prose for an assignment, get a grip!

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
It's about intellectual honesty. It should be unambiguous what parts of a creative work are actually your creativity, and what parts are borrowed from others. Besides that, citations make a great way to pursue further reading. If an interesting idea gets mentioned in passing in an essay I'm reading, then if it's cited I can go read that other work. That's why you're supposed to cute your own works, when an idea in a given essay is just lifted from something else you wrote. I, as a reader, can then go check out that work, and in turn be lead to the ideas that helped shape that one by the citations in that work.
MauranKilom 4y ago
> these days ML systems can easily detect significant copying and auto-attach credits. I don't know if you used google in the past, like, 5 years, but it proves this statement trivially false.

rasengan0 4y ago

>That is not how writing works, and it is an idea Bello needs to disabuse herself of. [1] It's refreshing to see a lack of critique or commentary to the above statement with regards to gender, race, mental status, or any other categorization. But plagiarism does not appear to be a universal violation of ethics when discovered. [2] [1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/09/plagiarism-today-plagiarized-in-a-plagiarism-atonement-essay/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/09/plagiarism-today-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

rpmisms 4y ago

I can't imagine writing in the style that the guilty party utilizes. If I am writing a piece, it's either soulless corporate drivel or something I genuinely care about. My substack is not high-quality, but it's definitely me. I've never copy-pasted something there that wasn't in a block quote. Just sits wrong that it's possible for people to do that and feel good about it.

freeopinion 4y ago

Completely unrelated plagiarism story: Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam. The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.

mdonahoe 4y ago
Another unrelated story: A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top. I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.
- Fomite 4y ago
  I once graded an assignment handed in that still had hotlinks in blue underlined text from copy and pasting.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    In the 90s, I remember there being a piece of student work pinned to the public display board (this only happened to the best work). It had blue links in it. Either the teacher who marked and choose it had no clue what that meant or had no fucks to give, not sure which.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    We used to rick roll teachers by pretending to copy paste from the internet by writing "Please click here for more information" somewhere in the text. I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.

sircastor 4y ago

This is adjacent, but I’ve wondered how close we are to having these automated plagiarism detection systems start identifying large numbers of false positives. Especially as they adopt machine learning, and they let their fuzzy matches get a little more aggressive. Part of the problem with plagiarism in the abstract is that much of the work being submitted is not novel. Every one of us has been taught to read something, and then regurgitate it in a mildly different form to prove our successful learning of it. And our schools are spending tax dollars to buy access to these systems.

EamonnMR 4y ago
Back in my high school days we used a platform called TurnItIn which gave our writing a 'plagarism score'-too high and we'd need to rewrite the essay. It would flag silly things like two word fragments sometimes. I remember writing a strenuous objection because the license agreement (which I read because I was a bit of a stallmanite at the time) allowed the platform to publish our writing. In effect, they could supply plagiarism sites and then sell you the solution!
- tedd4u 4y ago
  Yeah universities use Turnitin, too. “Selling arms to both sides.”
cycomanic 4y ago
> This is adjacent, but I’ve wondered how close we are to having these automated plagiarism detection systems start identifying large numbers of false positives. Especially as they adopt machine learning, and they let their fuzzy matches get a little more aggressive. "how close we are" ...? The automated plagiarism engines have always had huge amounts of false positives. Essentially they are only useful for highlighting what they detected. Some of the things that I have seen them false detect: Direct cited quotes, common phrases and sentence structures. Factual explanations, e.g. a description of a specific aperatus which can only really be described in one way (even though exact wording differed). Reference lists, this was by far the most common reason for very high turnitin scores, when I used it turnitin was completely unable to pick up a reference list. The plagiarism scores of these systems are completely useless, I've found obvious plagiarism in work with scores of less than 3% (which is a very common score even if you would write an essay now) while I've had work with scores of >50% which were completely fine. Any teacher who uses the turnitin score for anything should be fired IMO, because they do not understand plagiarism.

macintux 4y ago

> In short, Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago. When I was a teenager I collected a couple of head-scratchers like this. I’d say they were ironic but I’d be afraid of being wrong. First: visited church with my grandparents, received a typewritten postcard a week or two later. Quote: “Thank you for visiting our church last Sinday.” Second: was listening to my favorite radio station, a local university-run station. One of the students who ran it read an editorial about complaints regarding pronunciation. She defended the personalities, said they were after all just students. The irony: she repeatedly mispronounced “mispronunciation”. I was 14 at the time, so didn’t have the courage to call and point that out, but I have to assume someone did.

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robocat 4y ago

> At the time, she told herself, “I’m just borrowing and changing the language. I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again.” We are taught how to plagiarise at university; where it is encouraged, and, you are marked on how well you do it. Paraphrasing is demanded of you. Repeating in your own words the content of other sources. Good marks for regurgitating the ideas of others with a false patina of creativity: rephrasing, synthesizing and summarizing your source material. It is a foul process with a false idol at its core: placing dishonest "creativity" on a pedestal, artistic license instead of honest copying of the source material, a sham instead of giving the source proper recognition. The real world mostly values execution, not a conceptual hall of mirrors, not ideas continuously warped and reflected with gross academic variations. Edit: "Plagiarise in your own words (citation please)" would be a way to say it ;-)

alisonkisk 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
Hold on, that is not the same thing "rephrasing, synthesizing and summarising your source material" (your words) is not plagiarism and is an important skill and if the source is appropriately given is not plagiarism. Still you are correct plagiarism education is often very bad.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Sentence manipulations can be performed without understanding anything of the material. The end result is the same thing as plagiarism, and isn't an important skill at all except if you try to get credit for work that wasn't yours. Many just spends their entire education getting better and better at transforming sentences and learns a lot of word/sentences equivalencies to take that even further, these are the people who can talk "intelligently" about coding problems without being able to code. Basically human form of GPT3.
  - lmm 4y ago

paulpauper 4y ago

I plagiarized a few times in high school to get out of deadlines for work I didn't care to do. I would copy paste the the essay on Word from a CliffsNotes-type site and rewrite some of it, rearrange some sentences and insert typos to make it look legit. Got As and passed the class. This was a long time ago, before it was possible to easily check this stuff. But in college? no way. they are way smarter at checking that stuff. Considering how much businesses delegate, I don't see the harm of letting people do it it. I think it's only wrong if someone is paying for original content or there is the expectation of original content through the implicit trust between the reader and the writer.

logifail 4y ago
> I plagiarized a few times in high school to get out of deadlines for work I didn't care to do. One time pretty much all the kids in my Chemistry class copied my homework, at that time I had the reputation for knowing what I was doing. Unfortunately there was a key error in one of my solutions, and all the other kids copied my solution faithfully - including the error. The teacher figured out pretty quickly what had happened and decided on an unusual reponse. He corrected my solution fully ... in my book. In everyone else's book the only thing he wrote was: "See $logifail's book" We didn't do that again!
- aspenmayer 4y ago
  I understand now that you meant your answer book for the exam under discussion, but for a moment I imagined that you were saying that you got away with it until much later, when your former professor was reviewing some professional published work of yours after the fact.
  - logifail 4y ago
    :eek: Looking at that again I really didn't choose my words very carefully, sorry. No published books here! Two exceeedingly minor scientific papers, but fortunately my misdeeds in school Chemistry were long forgotten by then. OT but interestingly in German there's a clear distinction in such cases between the word "Buch" (= book, of the sort that you read from) and the word "Heft" (= exercise book, of the soft-bound variety that you write in).

alisonkisk 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

It's a bit ironic how the author talks about how to avoid plagiarism by not copying sections verbatim to later rewrite them, while at the same time the author seems to have done this himself, when taking passages from his history of plagiarism article for a piece he wrote for turnitin. Now he was copying his own words, so the ethics are somewhat murkier. I would still argue it's bad form to do this for a work for hire like the turnitin piece. Moreover it seems he also does not follow his own advice of not taking passages from other texts for later rewriting.

cycomanic 4y ago
I know it's generally frowned upon to comment on voting, but can someone explain why the downvotes? I'm really trying to understand what in the above warranted to be voted down. I've noticed that there has been much more downvoting recently. The weird thing is that often posts a few levels down, in both sides of a discussion would get downvoted even though they seemed to make perfectly fine arguments (that I might have agreed or disagreed with). It almost feels like there is some bots that randomly apply votes in discussions.
- idontknowmyacc 4y ago
  Yeah they are bots really. Humans bots. 90% of population of whatever forum, pages, etc.How in the hell is plagiarism to "copy" ideas? Those people never have been read Sh.?

aaron695 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

I would argue that Tools like turnitin et al and their use of a "plagiarism score" are at least partially to blame. Teachers already in high-school seem to often tell students to self check and that "a score above 20" (arbitrary number) will result in a fail, as if some percentage of plagiarism is ok. I was shocked when I took over a thesis course and students were asking what was the acceptable score. They also told me that students had failed previously due to a too high score because turnitin picked up the reference list as plagiarised. Now this is clearly the fault of teachers, but the increasing demands on them, plus the turnitin advertising to easy the burden by making this score is also partly to blame IMO.

SCLeo 4y ago
I didn't even know it is possible to reliability get turnitin scores to be lower than 20. It always marks my entire references section as plagerized, resulting a score of 20%-30%.

trevcanhuman 4y ago

It just baffles how much effort as humans of modern education and academia have put into being super mad for using other people's ideas. Sure, I agree that this guy is somewhat the victim and she shouldn't have done that. But really, how is it that we've come so far as a society and just scream at things like these ? Isn't knowledge supposed to be shared ? Even if it's not properly attributed ? There are plenty of misattributions in Mathematics, theorems who people did not create or develop at all, yet their name has been recited for years and years in elementary and middle schools. Yet teachers will say that plagiarism is bad! But hey, don't worry if we call this theorem like this because this is ok and it's actually not plagiarism. We're literally just regurgitating ideas, as several commenters have said (good luck getting the primary sources for my comment lol). Also, should my ideas be considered plagiarized even when I thought of them before someone else published them ? Interesting dilema, at least for me.

thisNeeds2BeSad 4y ago
Maybe use plagiarism to detect influence of thought & ideas as trees instead and reward accordingly? Problem is though, that rewards self-promoters instead of rigorous scientists.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  Congratulations, you've reinvented citations. Paper A cites papers B, C, and E, which in turn cite F, etc.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
In an academic context, plagarism enforcement is less about the theft of ideas (which are no less stolen when simply regurgitated with a citation next to them), than as it is about establishing a chain of influence. If I write an article that uses someone else's ideas, then I cite them, so that a reader can go "huh, that idea's interesting, let me go see where that came from" and then they can see what influenced those ideas by that papers citations and so on and so on. The fact that students don't have this concept of intellectual chain of custody hammered into their skulls is a failure of the education system. Citing quotes is obvious, but in this day and age it's probably the least necessary. I can Google an exact quote and find exactly the article it came from. Much harder to search is provinance of paraphrased idea or general concept, or the source of a factual statement that I find dubious.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

My opposite of plagiarism anecdote, where I still didn't do the work but got credit for it. When I went to High School in Utah it was after going to a really advanced Junior High in Oregon, and I was very spoiled and felt that the work was boring and beneath me. One of the classes I took I should have been grateful for as a dream class for a kid like me, it was a class on reading Science Fiction and Fantasy where you had to write a book report on the books read (once a week, once every two weeks? don't remember, maybe once per month). I generally read a book every day or two, and I wrote quite quickly so it shouldn't have been difficult. But I found these book reports difficult to write because they had a template for how they wanted the reports written that I found insulting to the books I had read, if I had read a book I liked I didn't want to insult it that way, and if I read a book I didn't like I didn't want to think about it any more. So I hit on the expedient solution of writing book reports on fake books, I don't remember any of the books other than one that was a stereotypical Fantasy quest to stop the dark lord thing, called "The Hinterlands of Horlon" ugh, of course I gave it a negative review with some bright spots just keep anyone from being interested in reading it. Didn't get found out though.

zw123456 4y ago
Ever consider actually writing one of your fake books now and bringing it to fruition?
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  Well, since I wrote essays saying the books sucked to make sure that nobody would think, damn, I gotta read that book - no. Although I do have some books I have written there is not much money in being an author unless one succeeds wildly and so I have not put the effort into publication as that is not the interesting part of writing.
HPsquared 4y ago
Reminds me of this sketch by Fairbairn Films, "When you write a report on a book you never read" https://youtu.be/XB2j8oBddbw https://youtu.be/XB2j8oBddbw
4y ago

isaacfrond 4y ago

I'm not sure, we need to get worked up about his. An actual example of the so-called plagiarizing is given here: https://www.gawker.com/media/jumi-bellos-lithub-essay-about-plagiarism-looks-very-plagiarized https://www.gawker.com/media/jumi-bellos-lithub-essay-about-... In Bello’s article, for example, she wrote the following: Plagiarism has been with us since the birth of language and art. For as long as there have been words to be read, there has been someone there copying the passages. It goes as far back as 8 AD with the poet Martial who caught another poet Fidentinus reciting his work. He called Fidentinus a plagiarus, meaning a “kidnapper.” Compare that to this 2011 article in Plagiarism Today, titled “The World’s First ‘Plagiarism’ Case.” Plagiarism, the act of taking another’s work and passing it off as your own, has almost certainly been with us since the dawn of artwork and written language. For as long as there has been art and artists, there have been people who have put their name to it incorrectly. But while the act of plagiarism is as old as time, the word “plagiarism” is not. The etymology of the word plagiarism is an interesting one and its history actually dates back to the first century AD and involves a Roman poet and his literary “kidnappers” who became the subject of a literary beating.

jjeaff 4y ago
I'm confused. That is not plagiarism at all. The facts included are the same, but they are written completely differently.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Yea, it's paraphrasing. But it's still a terrible way to write. Bello's version even contradicts itself giving 8 AD as the beginning of plagiarism, not the origin of the word. That's what happens when you paraphrase by reshuffling the words instead of creating new writing from the information that's in your head.
  - drakonka 4y ago
    Paraphrasing can for sure be a very common form of plagiarism[0][1] [0] https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/is-paraphrasing-considered-plagiarism/ https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/is-paraph... [1] https://law-richmond.libguides.com/c.php?g=998384&p=7227189 https://law-richmond.libguides.com/c.php?g=998384&p=7227189

kieckerjan 4y ago

Trigger warning: shameless (but pertinent) brag coming up. In my first year of college I had to write a short essay for an English course. I was rather lazy as well as a fan of wordplay so I wrote an essay describing the life and work of an obscure 19th-century philosopher, who also happened to be completely fictional. Since I could just pull the "facts" out of my ass, it was easy to write. A week later I was called in by the English department and had a sit down with two grim looking teachers. They confronted me with suspicions of plagiarism. Most of their case was built on my use of the word "gamut", which they thought a 19-year-old non-native speaker was not supposed to know. I was incensed (as well as flattered), but they only relented after I pointed out that the essay was an acrostic. The first letters of the paragraphs spelled the word "humbug".

jokowueu 4y ago
Haha . What was their reaction ?!
- kieckerjan 4y ago
  I made the grade.
carlob 4y ago
This is something most people who have never learnt a foreign language don't get, but usually the fancier the word sounds, the more likely it comes straight from Greek or Latin and to be pretty much the same in your native language. For example: a native Italian speaker who is not very fluent in English will first think of velocity rather than speed, because speed is velocità in Italian.
- noneeeed 4y ago
  Also, I've found that many non-english speakers learn a lot of their vocabulary from written sources, and so use "fancier" words than many of us native speakers would. It reminds me of time a colleague was on the bus. Someone pressed the bell to stop when they didn't mean to. A voice with a strong foreign accent piped up from the back "I apologies, I depressed the indicator but do not wish to alight". It was absolutely perfect english that no native speaker would utter. I always struggled with the formal and informal forms in French and later when I was trying to learn Japanes, and tended to err on the side of the formal, so I'm sure I'd have sounded similar.

dariosalvi78 4y ago

while it is clear that Bello borrowed the text from the blog, she did paraphrase it to a good degree. I struggle to call it plagiarism, but, yes, I would have definitely cited the original source. The thing with plagiarism is that it's either (almost) verbatim or it's not plagiarism, because, otherwise, everything is plagiarism. That's how culture and ideas work.

mkl 4y ago
What makes it plagiarism is passing it off as your own, i.e. not citing your sources.
idontknowmyacc 4y ago
My country's main writer took entirely the V act of Hamlet into their second chapter of his main novel. He's a Nobel, though. That's how culture runs, that how it works. Nobody can master words as Sh did. And he was so good at writing plays if and only if someone else wrote that play before, at least as a tale.
idontknowmyacc 4y ago
Elliot, on the other hand, likes to say where a line in his poem comes from. WTF man, I'll never read you if I didn't know.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
That is incorrect in an academic context. Obviously different contexts have different expectations of citation and attribution, but plagarism is not just about infringing someone's copyright by stealing their work verbatim. It's about misrepresenting someone else's ideas/research/analysis as your own. I can restate Plato's model of concrete things being mere shadows of abstract ideals however I damn well please, but if I don't mention that I got that idea from Plato, it's still plagarism.

bloak 4y ago

A very common form of plagiarism on the Internet is people copying transcriptions of public-domain works without mentioning where they copied them from. You know it's happening because you see the same transcription errors repeated on dozens of web sites. (Of course there is no copyright violation here.) A very common case of copying without attribution is in contracts and policies, which are nearly always adapted from existing documents. Probably this doesn't count as plagiarism because nobody expects these things to be original, authors are not named, and there is no tradition of citing sources. (However, in many cases it probably is copyright violation, even if nobody cares to complain about it.)

Borrible 4y ago

When necessary, I happily plagiarize answers from Stackoverflow the whole day long. However, I shy away from recursive structures. They may be meta and cool but not always efficient. I was once approached by a young job recruiter. Since I am a fan of literary and linguistic issues and he had a master's degree in German studies, I googled for his master's thesis. Interesting topic, which I will leave unnamed here because.... Because I found an Austrian bachelor's thesis posted online ten years before this master's thesis, by a different person but with the same topic. And in my opinion with a quite similar structure and analog passages. Since my interest was piqued, I researched further and found the doctoral thesis of the professor who had supervised the master's thesis. Another twenty years older. It was based on the same book as the master's thesis and the baccalaureate thesis with a broadly related topic, though of course much more in-depth and expanded. Unfortunately, the book was not 'Felix Krull'. All three writings, however, were, in my opinion, excellent in terms of craftsmanship. As Nietzsche taught us, nothing is true everything is permitted.

deleted 4y ago

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taylorius 4y ago

Am resisting the urge to grab someone's comment from here, change a couple of words, and repost it as my own "related plagiarism story". ;-)

kuroguro 4y ago

Self-plagiarizing anecdote: in uni we had a subject called "Technical English" where we had to learn amazing words like "printer" among other things. Obviously nobody took it seriously. About 5 minutes before class I realized a short powerpoint presentation was due that day on some "technical subject". Fortunately our teacher was substituted and we had done a presentation like it before. So I took my last presentation, changed the name to something vaguely different (as I knew it would be written down), repeated my last presentation word for word and no one was the wisest. Saw a few grins as my classmates started realizing what's going on ^^; _edit_ I'm not from an English speaking country in case anyone is wondering.

ghaff 4y ago

One interesting aspect of plagiarism is self-plagiarism which is often OK but sometimes not. Copy over some boilerplate description or background to a new document sure. Even write a book that's draws in part from published blog posts? Sure, as long as you have the copyright. (I once wrote a book that was based in part on reworked blog posts from various places. When I submitted for Kindle, it got flagged. But I submitted some links and everything was OK.) On the other hand, if someone commissions me to write an article on something, I generally speaking shouldn't reuse much directly from past articles.