The Way We Plagiarize Now
By far the most-viewed and most regularly viewed individual pages on my blog are posts analyzing Katherine Mansfield’s and Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Which: yay people interested in Katherine Mansfield and Flannery O’Connor. Multiple visits, however, have arrived by Google searches for entire phrases written not by Mansfield or O’Connor but by me.
I wonder if my posts got good grades.
A Times writer fears that copy/paste makes The Way We Plagiarize Now different from the file-in-the-frat or sorority-house method not in the amount of retyping required but in the kind of thinking it fosters:
When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
(Young people: is this true?? Digital media: it is changing everything!)
As a teacher, I’m less worried about plagiarizing than about basic grammar and usage. My students’ mistakes tend to be consistent and distinctive enough that exceptions immediately stand out. Once I found my own comments incorporated into a later draft of a personal statement. Another time a pair of students writing a research paper hadn’t removed the “prepared for…” from their cover page before printing (search for “paper writing service” and prepare to be creeped out.)
Editorial writers love to point out Something We’ve Never Seen Before, and The Way Things Used To Be (in which decades are smoothed into a uniform, irretrievable past).
One summer I was a research assistant for a former professor. I really only had a few hours of work each day, but I always seemed to end up spending hours in the stacks. There were magazines going back to the 20s, some with pre-ZIP code mail-in offers still in them (“What will she do when you’re gone?” over a pensive line-drawing of a man in a short, wide tie, poring over his life insurance policy). There were Theory books I’d heard cited like the word of God but never read. And of course novels, stories, and poetry. The only difference from web surfing was more complete works from more eras more readily available. Also having to climb stairs, the feel of paper, and the scent.
Now that’s a sea change. Old Books. Someone should make a room spray. Fill your house with time. Before it all flattens out into Past and Present.
