Preventing Plagiarism

I really hate the idea of unintentional plagiarism. I’d like to think that it’s just an excuse made up by people who got caught and aren’t willing to admit their mistakes.

But there are so many different sources of information these days, it can, admittedly, be tricky to keep track of exactly where you got a piece of information in order to properly attribute it, or you might forget if your notes were word-for-word from a source or paraphrased, so they might not get attributed that way.

These things shouldn’t happen if you’re a careful reporter, of course, but it is still possible.

A Bad Example

I recently read a book that I was reviewing for a website (not the same one I wrote about the other day), and the book was just littered with plagiarism. The author even used the phrase “I stole this from” a publication. Another time he said he couldn’t remember where he got the information, but he used it anyway.

(This was a self-published book. I like to think any legitimate publisher would laugh such a work out of the building.)

The book, otherwise, was actually kind of good. But this blatant ripping off of other people’s work made me so angry I trashed the book.

I felt a little bad about it, writing my editor and saying I could be less harsh if she didn’t feel as passionately about the issue as I did. But she let it ride (thanks!).

Why Plagiarism Sucks

I come from a journalism background, so I’m probably more sensitive to plagiarism than most. Any violation of intellectual property bothers me; stories of journalists who steal from others hurt me to the core.

Plagiarism to me is a sign of laziness, at the very least a lack of intellectual rigor and at worst malice and stupidity.

It should be your goal as a writer never to give people room to even question you on the grounds of plagiarism.

Defending Against Plagiarism

The issue of people stealing from you is separate from not being a perpetrator of the crime, and we’ll get to that tomorrow.

In the meantime, make sure that you aren’t committing plagiarism by being as careful as possible to take good, detailed notes, to always put things that are direct quotes — whether from an interview or other research — into quotes in your notes, and keep your note-taking separate from your writing by using a different document when you start to write your story rather than composing the story in the same document you transcribed your notes into.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Craig Silverman has a great roundup of tips to prevent plagiarism that it would do any writer good to read and commit to memory and common practice.

In particular I like the notion that if something sounds particularly witty or clever, or uses words you wouldn’t normally use, double check it, because you probably didn’t come up with the concept yourself (just as I didn’t come up with that concept myself).

This is one of the many areas of writing where you literally can’t be too careful. A plagiarism charge can ruin a career or at least ruin a relationship with an editor and/or a publication that could cause you problems for a long time to come.