Plagiarism

There are two cases of plagiarism that I remember from my past. One occurred when I was doing translation work for some students. One of the students (A) was having a lot of difficulty writing his piece. So one of the others (B) lent A hers, so that he could get an idea of the type of writing that was required. When A finally handed me his piece to translate, I realised that most of it was copied word for word from B’s. This made my work of translating much easier, as I was able to copy from my previous translation. I did tell B about that.

A so-called “psychologist” advertised himself on the Internet, using text copied from another site. I happened to remember that I’d read this before and checked to make sure. I didn’t do anything about it. Perhaps I should have done.

There are those who say that all work should be freely available to everyone to do what they want with it. That’s fair up to a point. But I would be very hurt if someone won a prize for work that I’d done, or even if my blog post appeared on another blog, attributed to someone else.

That’s why I’m joining the campaign against plagiarism, which is being organised today on How Publishing Really Works.

If you want to quote from my blog, I shall feel honoured – as long as you say that it’s a quote and include a link back here.