Plagiarism has always been an obvious no-no in my life. Perhaps teachers correctly socialized me to consider it the greatest intellectual offense one can commit, or perhaps I recognized at an early age that copying off of someone else’s work is completely subpar to actually doing the work myself. Maybe it’s both.
Now, as a major in Writing Arts, plagiarism is simply unthinkable. Like a modern architect taking credit for the Parthenon, or a scientist claiming to have discovered gravity, a writer taking someone else’s composition and calling it his own makes no sense. If not because it is unethical, then because you lack a sense of purpose. A writer’s job is, quite simply, to write, and not to simply compile pieces of others’ writings like a computer. Whatever is written must be unique and off the top of the writer’s head, (prepare for self-gratification) much like I’m doing right now. Now, the composition can be grounded in existing work, and usually is. But for a writer to steal, blatantly or not, another’s work, he or she must be conning somebody, if only themselves.
Additionally, I found Rebecca Moore Howard’s secondhand revelation in “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism‘” about the way Tony Blair’s administration plagiarised (I gave it an “s” because this section of the post has to do with Britain – YaY bLoGs!) the intelligence dossier for the war in Iraq (11) extremely rich. Prime Minister Tony Blair is, of course, the British cohort of American President George W. Bush in the push for the controversial war. As this example of the “dodgy dossier,” as it is called, is mentioned in an article about students and plagiarism, it helps to paint the ongoing picture of Bush as nothing more than a schoolboy too stupid to earn high marks respectably. Truly, is there really doubt in anyone’s minds that this guy was (re)elected without any dirty hands?
Until later,
Ryan
