Comments on:

By: Sam of the ten thousand things

Sam of the ten thousand things — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:03:00 +0000

tag

Great review by the way.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 02:49:00 +0000

“You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?”

Thanks for this article. Loved it!

xop

By: Justin Evans

Justin Evans — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:57:00 +0000

I would not be so bold as to classify my problems with plagiarism as hysteria, but then, when I think of plagiarism, I do not think of Nabokov, Eliot, or cryptomnesia---I relate to my experience with students and assigned critical essays.

I know we are talking apples and oranges in some regards, but when a student hands in a paper wholly, or in part, cut and pasted from an essay provided by Schoolsucks (dot) com and expects full credit, plagiarism is not quite the blurred line as implied by the likes of Shakespeare or others taking plot lines and using stock characters to create a drama.

I am especially peeved at the concept of plagiarism because when I taught English I encouraged the use of quotes and summarization from other writers to help establish a point or to support a hypothesis.

I see where you are going, but distinctions should be made lest people try to argue the wholesale theft of written texts with what some poets and authors do with their artistic efforts.

By: David Vincenti

David Vincenti — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 01:46:00 +0000

This is where I think a background in technical writing is an asset - being trained to recognize the value in the references while positing our own hypotheses. Yes, plagiarism exists, but it gets peer-ejected quite quickly.

I also think technical writing, properly harnessed, helps a poet tend toward specificity and away from the abstract, but that's another issue entirely