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Plagiarists' Plague
If anyone else wrote these words before, I don't want to know; but I will probably find out. Because now there is a way to know.
While reporter Paul Collins shows that the likelihood of sentences being accidentally replicated winnows with length, I still believe -- having studied enough medieval and Renaissance authors who tore hunks of each other's manuscripts off as freely as Henry VIII did turkey legs -- that the real problem is not with copied words, sentences or paragraphs -- it's with copied ideas. If, like Herman Melville (Collins includes his example, too), you take long technical passages from maritime authors (look! I used Collins' phrase "maritime authors" -- take me away!) and then weave them in to Moby Dick, I don't think you're plagiarizing. I think you can weave something entirely new by using some recycled material. I'll say it again: Shakespeare did this a lot.
Perhaps I'm too heavily under the influence of blogging -- because, after all, this is what we bloggers do. We take other people's words and cut and paste them into links, chunks and other bits and bobs and then weave our own ideas and opinions around them. I try very hard (as do most of the responsible bloggers out there) to point out when and where I'm citing someone else.
Should fiction writers all emulate Dave Eggers' trope of footnotes whenever they're including someone else's material? What do you think?
bookmaven2005 at 7:51:00 AM EST Blog about this entry |
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If everyone who wrote became an Eggers , you could end up with books with appedices longer that the text itself... not something I am willing to buy read or lug about...
10/21/07 11:39 AM
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