Rote learning vs Ctrl X, Ctrl V
Posted 1 February 2008 // Carl Walrond
A peripatus plagiarising
When I was fifteen I plagiarised an obscure Nadine Gordimer short story for English. It was about a woman taking a shortcut and getting mugged. Luckily, my English teacher didn’t read South African authors. I got a high mark.
It is my only case of almost-pure plagiarism, yet it has shades of grey – I added bits, cut most of it. If I stole anything, it was the idea (OK, and some really nice sentences).
Playing around with a bit of text taught me a lot. Before cyberspace, plagiarism was educational – you had to type (or in my case handwrite) word-for-word. This is an effective learning technique known as rote learning. But you don’t take in much when you’re just selecting a block of text and pressing Ctrl X, Ctrl V.
Turnitin would have busted me. Many universities now require students to submit essays through this program. It runs an algorithm that compares the essay with hundreds of thousands of articles in a database and gives the text an originality score. Cut-and-pasted passages stand out like a dog’s family jewels.
Plagiarism can be hard to define. I’ve thought about it quite a bit while working on the encyclopedia. For example, if I’m captioning an image of a peripatus, I get a book from the library and look at captions of similar images and skim the text. I crib words from one book, some more from another. I dump it into the mix, edit it, cutting out all redundancy (isn’t that right, eds?) A word for this process – as long as you cite the source and don’t copy word-for-word – is research. But Te Ara doesn’t have footnotes for captions, as this would have created too much work and cluttered our web pages.
So am I a plagiarist? It would seem not – luckily our editors (liposuctionists) remove redundancy, lack of clarity and repetition. After they have J. Edgar Hoovered out the fat, our captions are different beasts.
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry. As Mark Twain wrote in a letter to Helen Keller after she was accused of plagiarism: ‘As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!’
Interestingly, the Media Watch show on Radio New Zealand National recently looked at a similar topic. They talked to Massey University lecturer Alan Samson about his study into plagiarism in journalism, and whether it is becoming more widespread in the age of the internet. You can listen to it on the Media Watch page - this segment begins at about 15.50.