I started this thread to not hijack the other thread running.
I thought I knew what plagerism is, but now am not so sure.
Fretful Porpentine:
I am an amature writer, have never been published, and probably never will be (I have never submitted anything). I make no secret that my inspiration and model is Dave Barry, columnist, humourist and pundit. I try to write like him. Is that plagerism? stealing a style? I think not. I write about things that have happened to me, and add enough “frosting” to make it funny. So much so that I would call it fiction. Most of my stories are based on personal experiences and I got the scars to prove it. I did write one story that had nothing to do with me, but was based on a story told to me. Is that plagerism?
Plagiarism is claiming someone else’s work as your own. Usually, that involves lifting section of text from another source. It not an issue if you take someone’e exploits and rewrite them, so long as you’re writing them in your own words.
It’s usually an issue in an academic context: either students are lazy, and just copy material and try to sneak it by the teacher, or they don’t know the proper way to cite. If you take a paragraph from a work, you’re supposed to credit the original author, and some students don’t realize this (for instance, they may think that merely listing the book in the bibliography is enough).
When writing fiction, it’s only plagiarism if the text already exists and you copy it.
Thanks, one more question, And this is not about writing fiction, but in other works what do you do with a sentence or phrase you know is not your own but have no idea where it came from? Is citing "unknown"good enough or should one just not use it?
seenidog - I’m an academic writer, so I am less familiar with the rules in fiction writing, but Chuck’s explanation is spot on. Being derivative of a certain style is not plagiarism. I, for one, feel that Helen Fielding owes a lot stylistically to Sue Townsend. But the stories and words she uses are her own.
It’s inevitable that one can find similar sentences or dialogue in books on similar topics. But in the case of the Opal Mehta book, there are something like 40 separate clauses or sentences that are lifted more or less verbatim from the McCafferty book, or with minor fiddling. In a genre like chick lit, I would imagine there are a lot of familiar plot devices, so simply writing a story that sounds very much like another isn’t plagiarism (i.e., Romeo & Juliet and West Side Story).
To answer your last question, I would suggest in this day and age, you can probably track down the original use of a sentence or phrase using Google or such. If you absolutely cannot, I would suggest adding the phrase, “as others have said,” so people know that you know that it came from elsewhere. But as I tell my students, why not say it in your own words? It will probably sound better, make more sense, and you don’t have to worry about stealing someone’s intellectual property.
In that situation, you should either track down whose quote it is or just not use it. If you don’t know who said it, who knows if you’ve got the quote right or even if someone ever said it in the first place. To use it would open you up for a lot of abuse.
Of course, it depends on the context, sort of. If you’re just on a message board somewhere and want to use it, then you’d probably be okay as long as you make it clear that you didn’t say it. But if you’re writing a paper for school or an article for a magazine or something, then you need to find a new quote with a known author, find the author of your quote, or just not use the quote. If the quote is so important that your argument hangs on it, then it’s important enough to find the source. To not do so looks really lazy and maybe a little dishonest.
Thanks for the replies HH and Ms Purl. I do notwrite texts, by day I am a computer tech and sometimes give presentaions to staff. We call them “Lunch and learns” Half hour quick and dirty “If you do it this way it would be good” sort of thing. I am not writing any textbooks here. That is where I am likely to quote someone else without a reference. In my private writing, I know every word went through these fingers. I was asking about ideas. To be specific, a County Deputy told me a story. I wrote it down, changed it to where I felt it was entertaining, is that theft? My wife says my writing must be some sort of crime, but I say the same about her cooking.
Plagiarism is more than just copying a sentence verbatim.
Essentially, plagiarism is taking someone else’s idea and presenting it as if it were your own. This is most overt when you use exactly the same words, but even paraphrasing can be considered plagiarism, since the ideas are not your own. To avoid plagiarism, you should give some kind of information about where the ideas you are presenting came from.
In the case of the County Deputy’s story, if you do not include information about the source (and something like “Here’s a funny story I got from a county deputy” would be sufficient in the context you are discussing here), then it is plagiarism. Without that citation, the audience will assume that the story is yours, and that you created it yourself. Taking someone else’s story and embellishing it is not the same as creating an original story.
I teach computer science classes, and I frequently bring up real-life stories to emphasize the things I am teaching. If the story happened to me (and most of them do), I can present it from my own point of view. However, if it’s a story that someone else has told me, I make sure to at least acknowledge that I got the information from a third source.
If I’m on the computer and writing a short story, plagarism is where I want to sound funny, so I flip open a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and copy out a passage from Douglas Adams.
If I’m on the computer and writing a research paper, plagarism is either where I want to sound smart, flip open a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica and copy out a passage from the editors, *or *where I’m lazy or stupid or possibly suicidal–in the case of one prof–and don’t bother to cite my research sources with footnotes1 or references (like this, page bazillion and two).
A key test for me in helping sincere students figure out if they’re plagiarizing is: would they be willing to acknowledge all the help they got? IOW, is it clear from the paper what every source is, or are there disguised sources or influences?
If they would be willing to discuss openly ALL of the sources or influences, but do not out of a wish to spare me the tedium of reading such overly scrupuolous and unnecessary documentation, then it’s not plagiarized 99 times out of 100. But if in doubt, over-document. All you’ll get is a note from to that effect, which is meaningless. Under-document, though, and you risk plagiarism. After a few papers, you’ll get a sense of what documentation is needed and what is not.
For example, in writing the above two paragraphs, I plagiarized from no one. But if I were to over-document, I’d have to admit to some possible self-plagiarism: I have advised students in the past on several occasions of this concept orally, and I’ve written some handout sheets containing some of the same ideas, and some of the same phrases, no doubt. I could produce some of these documents, dating from 1999 through 2004, if you’d like.
That third paragraph is completely unnecessary from the point of view of a requirement in posting on the Straight Dope, but it does display the extent to which I relied on someone’s work (my own) in composing the first two paragraphs. When I ask students to follow the standards of scrupulous, totally honest documentation, there’s usually a big difference between that and the slipshod coverup that students try to adhere to on their own.
IOW, most plagiarists know they are doing something wrong, and are covering it up and using a feigned “ignorance” of the rules as their excuse.
If you say the thing happened to someone else, without giving names, it is fine. It’s even fine if you say it happened to you, assuming the person who told you the story says it is okay. And you definitely want to change things. Writing is all about selecting and modifying to make your work funnier and realer than real life. S J Perleman wrote a book, Westward Ha, about a trip around the world. In his letters we see him bemoaning that nothing interesting happened at a stop, and how to change events around to be funny.
Anyhow, I think you get the message that you’re not even close to plagiarism.
You see, in fiction, using an idea is perfectly OK. West Side Story takes the same ideas as Romeo and Juliet, yet it is not plagiarism. Same with Forbidden Planet and The Tempest. Or A.E. Van Vogt’s Empire of the Atom and I Claudius. Terry Brooks Shannara books and LOTR.
Ideas for fiction are fair game (take a look at all the stories based on Joseph Campbell’s ideas of the hero – including those written after he wrote about it).
