I absolutely don’t intend a political discussion here. However, I think the speech last night is an important example of what plagiarism often looks like. I’ve seen various people saying things like “it was just a small part of the speech” or “the actual number of identical words is small” or “it doesn’t count because some of the words are changed.”
Please tell your college kids that none of those lines will work. That speech would result in failure of my class, and reporting to the judicial board.
I really think, judging by comments I’ve read this morning (and things students have said to me) that what constitutes plagiarism is not widely understood. Summer before freshman year is a good time to have this conversation with your student.
I said last night that my students would fail their assignment immediately, probably fail the course especially if they give me a ridiculous answer like “oh they’re just common phrases.”
This would be plagiarism at any university and it’s a good lesson- you will be caught. You just can’t do something like this in an era of TurnItIn, etc.
If it does happen and it’s an honest mistake (which does happen on occasion), do not lie about it. Especially when it’s beyond blatant. Come clean and you may be able to salvage your academic career and perhaps even the course.
Do you think it was intentional or inadvertent? The words in question may have been spoken by many people (I haven’t done the research) in that manner…I am absolutely wondering this morning and wondering how many speeches I may have written in thirty years that sequenced words in a particular manner that may or may not have been spoken by someone else but came to mind at the time I was writing the speech.
We get that comment a lot in class. But in actuality, the continual order of phrases, with similar wording is incredibly hard to happen accidentally. Because it’s like four or phrases in a row, each echoing the same lines in the same order from the earlier speech.
It would absolutely be considered plagiarism in any college.
Even if by some miracle it was an accident, how could they not run it through a plagiarism check first? Wasn’t Joe Biden’s fall from grace years ago caused by plagiarism? Those were low tech days too.
I have to admit I was probably ten times more careful in both undergrad and grad about my writing than I am now where I’m often under-pressure to just write, get it done, and get what I’ve written accepted my whomever has to “deliver” the words. I am sure many reporters are busy googling the snippets as we discuss…
Even if every word was changed to a synonym, but the meaning, order, and structure of the sentences stayed the same–still plagiarism. And the intent to hide would really tick me off.
Joe Biden plagiarized a speech of Neil Kinnoch. Last night one of the commentators said he also plagiarized Bobby Kennedy.
Given that most convention speeches are forgotten 5 minutes later, I am wondering who remembered Michelle’s speech well enough to realize the similarities or is someone running the speeches through one of the computer programs that colleges use?
Momofthreeboys, come ON now. Do one minute’s worth of research. This was as blatant as it gets. (Did you also notice that the husband of last night’s speaker used the exact same phrasing on his twitter praising his wife as the husband of the speaker from whom the speech was plagiarized?)
I went to bed thinking … the speaker did a nice job, carried herself well, checked all the boxes (and politics aside, wore an awesome dress!). I woke up this morning to this. You can’t make this stuff up.
FWIW I believe heads will roll among their speechwriters this morning. It would, however, be easier to blame them if she hadn’t told Matt Lauer that she wrote the speech herself, with very little help.
What astounds me is that you can plagiarize your own work. I would have been thrown out of college 40 yrs ago for reusing versions of my own papers as often as I did.
I’m not sure at times what constitutes plagiarism so I can only assume many people do not understand ( because I am obviously more informed than the average bear )
That said, politically, the camps are battened down and this event wont influence anyone anyway. Everyone will just dig in deeper.
They are making it worse by continuing to lie and blame others. Students do the same thing and it always makes it worse.
Do not treat your instructor like an idiot especially once caught. We have written and read thousands of papers. We know the difference between inspired and copied.
Believe me, I am no fan of the speaker or her husband. But it is hard to get worked up about plagiarism when the ideas at issue are utter cliches – exactly what you would expect to hear in a political spouses’s speech.
The IDEAS that were lifted is what is known in copyright law as “scenes a faire”; the uncopyrightable portions of a story or text that are absolutely expected in the genre and that therefore no individual can own.
That certain passages can be matched almost word for word suggests more than just the lifting of ideas. But, here, the expression of the ideas (the actual words used) was itself so cliched and banal that again it is hard to get worked up about it.
It is very hard to claim copyright protection for unoriginal words and phrases that are exactly what are expected in a particular situation. So, yawn.
To me, that’s the biggest problem: treating your audience as if they’re the stupid ones and assuming no personal responsibility. Our kids need to learn to own up and exactly what defines plagiarism.
Sax–I didn’t know about “self-plagiarism” as a thing until I was an instructor. However, we do tell the students about it, not just spring it on them.
The basic thinking is that each instructor expects the work for their class to be freshly done for that class. OTOH, it’s cool to ask an instructor if you can rework a former paper from another class.
Plagiarism probably shouldnt be the word for that, but it’s the common usage.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the plagiarism (and in my book that is what it was) was the result of multiple writers working on the speech. One makes some suggestions like “Write something like this… (the words in the original speech from 8 years earlier). This is the tone you should be aiming for.” and the changes made by the person ultimately responsible for the speech were minimal, with that person not really realizing that the phrases they were using were not the original work of their speechwriter, but something they’d taken from someone else’s previous speech.
I’ve seen kids get into trouble for something similar. They take notes from sources then can’t remember what was taken verbatim from the source (plagiarism) and what was their own paraphrasing of the central ideas of someone else’s work (not plagiarism if the source is listed in the bibliography). This is why students need to be very clear on their sources and making sure they give proper attribution.
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