Muskrat love
Plagiarism is reaching new levels of ridiculous: A romance writer has lifted passages from a Defender article about wild ferrets. The author of the original article has written about the experience for Newsweek. Apparently, bits of the nature writer’s semi-dry description of ferret society have been misappropriated as romantic dialog by Cassie Edwards for her romance, Shadow Bear.
The text from Paul Tolme’s article is lifted nearly verbatim, just spliced up into a conversation between the two characters. I expect this kind of ineptitude from the undergraduates I work with. Google-based plagiarism is typically easy to catch — usually, the culprit has picked a piece of writing that shows up on the first page of search hits. That seems to be what Edwards did as well.
While it’s funny to think of romance novel lovers getting off on discussion of ferrets’ eating habits, the incident points to larger problems. The internet may make writers more vulnerable, but it also exposes how brittle notions of intellectual property really are. I work with a number of international students seeking assistance with their writing. Routinely, I find boosted sentences and paragraphs in their work. These aren’t undergraduates avoiding their homework or trying to pull a fast one; usually, they’re highly intelligent, professionally motivated people who have moved to the U.S. for graduate study. In doing so, they’ve moved into a hot zone of proprietary thinking that is deeply at odds with the culture(s) they’ve grown up in. Explaining the notion of “copying” — of plagiarism — and why exactly it’s considered bad is one of the incidental tasks I dread. The concept is one of those that, frequently, just doesn’t translate.