Letters about plagiarism

I’ve been away for my week in the woods -- a campsite in remote pass where a patch of crown land separates Banff and Kootenay National Parks. I had a wonderful time. But I was completely isolated from modern technology. No Internet. No cell phones. No hourly newscasts. Not so much as one word about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Glorious! So I couldn’t write, let alone post, a Sharp Edges column for today. But I did get quite a lot of mail about last week’s column, accusing Melania Trump of plagiarizing some sentences in her speech to the Republican National Convention. Here are a few of those letters.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: plagiarism

Jul

2016

Plagiarism is theft, no matter who does it

Author: Jim Taylor

Ah, yes, I remember writing university essays. The process assumed that a mere student could never have an original thought. Anything that deserved thinking had been thought before. Therefore every assertion had to be referenced. I spent hours in the library, frantically thumbing through texts that I was sure I had read but now seemed utterly unfamiliar, looking for a page on which I was sure I had seen a particular sentence that I didn’t realize would be important at the time I read it, so that I could properly footnote it. Of course, in those days we assembled our data on 3x5 file cards. We didn’t have Google. Or Wikipedia. Or TurnItIn.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: plagiarism

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Letters about plagiarism

Plagiarism is theft, no matter who does it

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