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You can call a banana a pickle, but that doesn’t make it one.</p>
<p>And the term “self-plagiarism” doesn’t even make sense. What makes this complicated is that some folks are trying to make two different things the same. They aren’t. While there may be good reasons to prohibit the practice of double-dipping, it is not the same at all as plagiarism, and it’s absurd to claim that they are ethically comparable.</p>
<p>Here’s a thought experiment: Over the summer, a student reads James Joyce’s Ulysses. He’s so taken with it that he writes an essay about the religious thems in the novel. He puts it in a drawer. In the fall, he takes a class on Joyce–and turns that essay in as his first paper. What, if anything, is unethical about that?</p>