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June 20, 2011
Unconscious Plagiarism
By Rachel Toor
It amuses me in the classroom when I hear students quoting me
back to myself. As my peculiar sentences and ideas come out of
their mouths, I smile and wonder if they are aware they are
parroting me. They repeat things I've said as if they were Platonic
forms of ideas.
It kind of makes me think I'm doing my job. Thomas Jefferson
wrote, "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction
himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me."
One of the things I say to my students is that good writers steal. By
that, I mean that when you read like a writer, you look to see the
moves and tricks that other authors are using, and you seek to
emulate them. Of course I don't mean copying specific words or
sentences, but adopting ways to build tension on a line-by-line
level, tricks to make fluid transitions, and the ability to create
beauty by putting unlike things next to each other.
So in my writing courses, we look at Martin Luther King Jr.'s
sentences and copy his structure. We examine what happens
between John McPhee's paragraphs, and we study Joan Didion's
curious juxtapositions.
Sometimes reading like a student means imitating. That was the
idea behind ancient "copy books," where pupils simply
retranscribed the writing of others. Rote memorization used to be a
popular form of learning. How many of us had to be able to recite,
as English majors, the first 10 lines of The Canterbury Tales in the
original middle-muddle of the language? How many English majors
still do?
So when I hear my own words and ideas come flying back at me, I
try to take it as the sincerest form of flattery. At least when it comes
from my students.
Years ago, I dated a scholar who was well and widely published.
When I saw my ideas and sentences appear in print in his books and
articles, it did not please me. If you're such a big fat deal, I thought
(and may have said), come up with your own damn ideas and
sentences. As an editor, I never maintained ownership over things I
added to manuscripts. It was my job to improve a manuscript. As a
girlfriend, however, it was a different story. I felt ripped off.
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Recently a friend, a graduate student in another discipline I've
informally mentored for years, sent me a draft of an essay he was
working on. I read it with interest; my interest piqued when I
recognized neologisms, linguistic tics, and ideas on his pages. At
first I thought: Gee, this sounds familiar. Then I thought: Are you
freaking kidding me?
When we exchanged e-mails, I told him I was surprised to see him
making choices in his writing that sounded so much like mine.
Unapologetic, he responded, "I do everything I can to steal (I mean
learn) from you, whether it's word choice or big ideas. How the hell
else am I supposed to get any better at this?"
I don't want to be chary with either my ideas or my willingness to
help friends. But sometimes that kind of thing can feel like a blow,
even though I know it does nothing to diminish me.
Attribution is as easy as appropriation, or it should be. I may go too
far to make sure that I give credit to those whose words, phrases, or
ideas so delight me that I can't help but filch them. If I use someone
else's writing exercise in class, for example, I say, "I stole this from
my thesis adviser, Judy Blunt." Or I'll write, "As my friend Jeff-theeconomist likes to say." In certain cases, I love citing the
provenance: I once heard Mary Karr quoting Martin Amis who
quoted Ian McEwen as saying something like, "When you publish a
book you become an employee of your former self." Putting myself
in that company makes me feel good.
But there are so many things—phrases, exercises, classroom
tricks—I've pilfered from others that for many of them, I couldn't
tell you the original source. Sometimes phrases from Wallace
Stevens or Milton show up in my prose, sometimes a line from an
Elvis Costello song. Even if my aim is true, I don't know how much
I'm stealing at any given time. Unconscious plagiarism is the cost of
paying attention to language.
My friend Nancy pointed out, when I was in mid-fume about this
issue, that Mark Twain said Adam was the only person who could be
certain he wasn't a plagiarist. When I got home, I Googled the quote
and found Twain actually wrote, "What a good thing Adam had.
When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before."
Nancy's version was, I thought, funnier. Only she and I would know
if I tried to pass off her version off as my own. But the fact is, she
and I would know.
I also found a passage from Twain about how a friend
complimented the dedication in The Innocents Abroad, saying he'd
always admired it, even before he'd seen it in Twain's book. "Of
course, my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for
burial," Twain wrote, but then the two friends went to a bookstore
and found the original in Oliver Wendell Holmes's book. To Twain's
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surprise, he discovered, "I had really stolen that dedication, almost
word for word. I could not imagine how this curious thing had
happened; for I knew one thing, for a dead certainty—that a certain
amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and
that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other
people's ideas."
Twain then remembered reading and rereading Holmes's poems
until his "mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim." He
wrote to Holmes to apologize, and the gracious guy wrote back that
he "believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in
reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves."
What I'm talking about here is clearly nothing new. In a 2007
Harper's essay called "The Ecstasy of Influence," Jonathan Lethem
looked carefully, historically, and smartly at this phenomenon
called "cryptomnesia," and at related concepts of plagiarism, collage
art, and the limits of copyright. More recently, David Shields
published a cranky book, Reality Hunger, a large chunk of which is
unattributed quotes to make his argument about all art being theft.
There is much talk in the wider culture about memes, and about the
spreading and replicating of ideas.
How much, though, do we talk about this in academe?
In our teaching, we all stand on the shoulders of those giants who
have lectured and seminar-ed us. Does it make any sense to say
where we learned what we learned? Do students care? Should we?
Even though scholars make a fetish out of footnoting, where do we
give credit to ideas or innovations whose provenance we're not
exactly sure of? Sometimes it's hard to tell where your original
notion ended and where it was driven further by conversation with
a friend or colleague. We're in the business of intellectual exchange;
it's an economy with little currency in the real world, so we have to
value in-group bartering. I wonder if that makes us more possessive
of what we think is ours.
I used to be surprised when academics so worried about being
scooped they were reluctant to take ideas for test-drives at
conferences. But then I heard horror stories about stolen research
and plagiarized theses, about grad students and junior colleagues
having their names left off published papers to which they had
contributed substantially. What scholar would do something like
that? Where is the pride that goes along with a teaspoonful of
brains? Is unconscious plagiarism less morally icky than outright
theft, even if the result is the same?
I think about the trope-stealing boyfriend, sentence-parroting
students, and the friend who plays dress-up in my linguistic quirks,
and wonder if petty pissiness might give way to rage if what these
imitators pilfered was something that mattered.
Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern
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Washington University's writing program in Spokane. Her Web
site is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and
questions directed to [email protected].
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I don't think most plagiarisms are "unconscious." Some people justify willful stealing by calling it unconscious
or inadvertent. You often notice that unconscious plagiarists discriminate the authors of their sources by
academic status and fame. They tend to over-credit their famous colleagues and dead European male
philosophers, while ignoring lesser known folks who actually gave them most up-to-date information--their
research assistants, graduate students, female colleagues, and junior scholars. The word "unconscious"
helps to exonerate their darker motives of profiting from other people's labor.
11 people liked this.
We know that Mozart, Bach and other pre modern composes extensively 'quoted' from themselves and other
composers. In my own field pre modern philosophers extensively recapitulated ideas from earlier writers.
Mostly they didn't think of this as plagiarism. They were attempting an encyclopedic statement of
knowledge of the field, and any educated person would know that this idea originated from Plato, this from
Acquinas and that from Bacon.
Perhaps our modern fixation with plagiarism is an artefact of copyright law, which was introduced in 1709,
which individualises and privatises a person's statement of and contribution to the store of human
knowledge. I therefore wonder whether we aren't sometimes being a little too precious in tracking the
'ownership' of terms and phrases. It also seems to me that some people are labelled plagiarists for what
appears to be minor reuses of others' phrases.
In contrast, some terms and phrases are commonly used without attribution, tho the concept was introduced
into the literature by an original contribution. It often takes considerable time, but I try to track down the
source and subsequently attribute the authors of such terms as conspicuous consumption (Veblen, 1899),
conventional wisdom (Galbraith, 1958) and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1973), just to pick a few from my
collection under C.
9 people liked this.
Interesting that you mentioned Martin Luther King in your article since he famously plagarised large portions
of his doctoral dissertation at BU. Even so, it was King who inspired so many people.
6 people liked this.
The compliment of hearing one's words returned without attribution can come in odd ways. A couple of
decades ago I was a writer for the president of a largish university who had been one of my undergraduate
professors. When working on a major speech or other document we started with an initial draft written by
one of the other of us and passed it back and forth through several drafts until he decided it was finished. I
used a word processor; he wrote and made emendations by hand for his secretary to type up. This meant
that when it was my turn I had to re-enter the entire document into my word processor. Through this
oscillating process attribution of authorship became confused. I realized this most vividly when my boss
apologized on one occasion for having omitted from a speech a passage on which, he said, I had worked so
hard and so long, and substituting for it a passage he had written for an earlier draft. Reading the final draft
I immediately saw that it was my passage which he had retained and his which he had eliminated. I thought
of Ted Sorenson's Pulitzer Prize and decided to keep this to myself.
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Somewhere in a medieval English poem (Piers Plowman?) there is a reference to priests who have
canoodle with matrons of the parish: "Their children sleep at other men's fires." I always figured that if I went
into the ghostwriting business full time I'd call my business Other Men's Fires.
11 people liked this.
some years ago a former undergraduate of mine who had published her first book wrote me with some
chagrin after she reread an earlier work of mine, to apologize for unconsciously assuming that she had
originated some organizing concepts of her work that had actually first appeared in mine. I told her: it is OK
to steal from your prof. But when it's someone else, I get miffed if my ideas are incorporated by others
without attribution, as has happened more than once.
2 people liked this.
I don't think it's necessarily weird to pick up someone else's verbal tics, although I wouldn't be flippant about
it. Depending on the circumstances, I wouldn't expect colleagues to cite me if they get ideas from casual
conversations either. If we were discussing my work, sure, but if they were just bouncing their ideas of me to
get a second opinion on one of their solo projects, I wouldn't consider any part of the conversation to be my
intellectual property.
3 people liked this.
I was in a situation similar to that of "11182967." My former boss is very intelligent, however writing was not
one of his strong suits. He'd ask me to write first drafts when he did not know how to begin. It was customary
in our office to put the initials of the author and the word processor at the bottom of the document; I put my
initials in both areas. The document would evolve through several passes back and forth between us, often
even to other concurring departments. Prior to the final submission, though, the document would be sent
back to me with the note, "Enna, for your final edit." I kept all the drafts along the way happy to note that my
writing, to a large extent, remained intact. That, however, only served to boost my ego.
If one memorizes the first 10 lines of The Canterbury Tales, one is going to get a D. The assignment is to
memorize the first 18 lines.
3 people liked this.
I'd say that if it's unconscious, it's not plagiarism. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a word for what it is.
Most of the citations I notice I myself making and journal editors and reviewers asking me to make are
trivial---citing what everyone with a brain already knows in order to kiss up to established biggies in the
journal and field. It is a kind of forced worship service of the old foggies now cluttering up thought in the
field. We all hate it but do it or else we cannot get published.
The preservation of and preservation of the accuracy of this system is not important. It stinks and good
riddance.
However, there is another sort of citation---tracing accurately as possible where my own best ideas actually
came from. Doing this honestly, to me, is important, to me---the keep me honed in of what allows my own
best thinking. As soon as I start telling lies or exaggerations to me about all my best ideas coming from,
say,......ummmmmmm ME, I cut myself off from the real sources of my best ideas. Good attribution is a tool
for staying lean edge-y and modest enough to still be actively learning even after good publishings, tenure,
and accomplishments (of the petty sort professors are inordinately proud of managing to do). THIS sort of
attribution is vital and worth working to preserve.
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Well, I do not see how in a scholarly community we can get upset with fellow scholars who hear our
scholarship and our affected by it to the point that it affects there scholarship. A MAJOR scholar in my field
and I discussed a key part of his book. I had some ideas, he used them. He mentioned me in the footnote. I
appreciated that, but if he had forgotten or not realized the impact of my views on his work, I would have
been fine with that also,
To add to what was said by "11182967": outside of academia, questions of authorship are very often
muddled and complicated by team writing, movement of documents through many levels of management,
and review by coworkers--among other reasons. One member of my family worked in the government for
many years, writing speeches with and for politicos and writing (usually anonymous) white papers for
internal consumption, as well as discussing ideas with (i.e. feeding information and sentences to) the press.
Anonymous and/or team-designated work is much more common in both government and the corporate
world--which makes it interesting that we in academia tend to lay the blame for "excessive" attention to
plagiarism on capitalist concepts of property ownership.
Of course, corporate workers (and, to a lesser extent, government workers) may not live or die on their
ideas--and certainly tend not to work on the same idea for such a long time--in the way academics do. And
of course rip-off artists abound everywhere, and credit is often not given to those who deserve it (especially,
as "walkingtree" mentioned, when those who deserve it are lower down on the food chain or are women or
minorities). But we might look more closely at the shared-authorship and anonymous-authorship practices
of these non-academic entities for ideas, if not about what we should do, at least about what most of our
students will be doing.
1 person liked this.
If a text was written by a team it should be credited to the team. The offence occurs where a text is written
by a team but credited to an individual, as if the individual had created it all themself. Minimally the text
should credit the team's contribution, for example, in an acknowledgement.
Plagiarism, as implied in Toor's article, is more complex than we often
assume. That makes the topic a bit more interesting than is often assumed. For
example, what if a freedom of information request unearthed the following?
“From: Charles Jordan
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 2:41 PM
To: Harold Doty and George Carter
Subject: FW: Re: Participating/supporting faculty
Dean Harold Doty and Professor George Carter,
Attached is my correspondence with Dean Joan Neal-Mansfield of the
Harmon College of Business Administration, Central Missouri State University
regarding permission to use CMSU’s definitions in our reports. As you can see,
I clearly asked permission to use the adopted maintenance reports without
proper citation and Joan granted us permission. I sent her a reply thanking her
and telling her a formal letter was not necessary since her email response
would suffice.
Charles Jordan”
This occurred at the University of Southern Mississippi. Why did Charles
Jordan write for permission to copy "definitions"? Why did he choose
to characterize it as use "without proper citation"? Is asking to
copy "without proper citation" a request to plagiarize? Does asking,
and getting permission, to copy "without proper citation" legitimize
plagiarism or sidestep questions of misconduct? And since this email was
meant to be kept secret (FOIA was required to obtain the email), does it mean
that private approval warrants copying "without proper citation"?
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I thought these were interesting questions. The University of Southern
Mississippi spent approximately $2.5 million to fire me for asking them. They
failed--but they were successful deflecting the questions. Nevertheless, I
still find them interesting. As mentioned above, plagiarism is more complex
than we often assume, which in my view makes the questions all the more
interesting.
For details, see, "University and AACSB Diversity" at
http//:ssrn.com=397169.
Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy and Information Systems
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi
Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
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