You assign some piece of writing to an employee. They give you something plagiarized. What do you do?
Let’s say in Case 1, they inserted a paragraph from Wikipedia; in case 2, half of the entire piece is lifted from somewhere else.
I would call them in, and show them the spot where they lifted the words. If they were a terrific valuable employee, I MIGHT give them one warning chance about this. But with a very stiff warning…and also with a plan to review every thing they churn out in writing. Your company does not want to be held responsible for using someone else’s material.
If not a valuable employee… I would terminate their employment.
Does your company have a policy about plagiarism? Some do. If the employee has violated a policy…they would lose their job, where I am.
Your post makes it sound like this has happened with this employee more than once. If that is the case…dismissed from the job. No excuse for that.
I would be incoherent with sizzling fury.
Case 1. Did the employee cite the source? I would give the employee a lesson on citations.
Case 2. This is a tougher one and the answer might depend on what exactly the paper was supposed to accomplish.
Is this writing that is going to be published? Or did you just ask them to do some research on an issue for you personally, or to be shared internally?
In either case, I would inform them that material quoted directly from sources needs an attribution in the text. (Although not necessarily an actual footnote; it depends on the type of writing.) If this was an internal research piece, I would point out that part of the value of the research is knowing which facts or opinions came from what sources. I would make sure that they understand that not doing so is plagiarism, and that it would mightily embarrass the company if published. (In addition to being simply wrong.) If it were something that was intended for publication; ie, this employee was supposed to be a real writer, then I would be seriously concerned about their ability to do the job.
I wouldn’t fire anyone after one misstep of this nature, unless they literally lifted an entire article from somewhere and just put their name on it. That would indicate deliberate theft, rather than possible lack of understanding of the need for attribution outside an academic context.
Speaking as a former manager of technical communications and corporate communications, I would need to know more before giving a firm opinion.
Is the employee a mature, experienced writer? Did they deliberately mislead or just not know better?
BTW, this thread is entirely hypothetical. I don’t have any employees. A Facebook friend was teaching a high school writing class where students plagiarized on an assignment, which made me wonder how plagiarism is viewed in the working world.
Consolation said exactly what I was trying to write in the amendment to my post.
Well…at my high school, plagiarism would result in a flat F on that assignment. F. No excuses.
In some college courses my kids took, it was clearly stated in the syllabus that plagiarism would result in failure of the course.
Some colleges will dismiss a student who plagiarizes…it is viewed as cheating.
So…it’s serious.
I might buy “didn’t know any better” for a young employee educated overseas. I wouldn’t buy it for any employee educated in the US. At some point, “didn’t know any better” actually means “did know better and disregarded all previous admonishments.”
Agree with consolation. Other things to consider:
Is writing a huge part of their job? If this was a newspaper reporter, for example, I might react differently than someone who occasionally writes a report.
Has this happened before? I would investigate other writing assignments to see if this is a habit or a one-time, pressed-for-time incident. If a habit – then fired, immediately.
Is this employee still learning on the job, or been around for years?
I’ve failed students for plagiarism, so I’m not a softie on it. But I do understand extenuating circumstances. The one time I was lenient was for a student who should have given credit to the right photographer (not himself) for an image. The kid was a freshman and practically burst into tears in my office. He had gone to an inner-city sub-par high school and had never been taught proper attribution, and had been caught plagiarizing in one college class that semester. If I had reported this, he might have been kicked out of school. He did not repeat the error in the next three years, and grew into quite a good writer and photographer.
In the real world, there are many cases of reporters who do not get automatically fired for plagiarism. They are often suspended. And the ones who are fired often get other jobs in journalism. Nina Totenberg is one example.
@cardinal Fang - LOL, you post a completely hypothetical scenario with very few details and then nit pick my question?
This is actually an interesting and complicated question in the legal world. In litigation, we write legal briefs that are submitted to the court. The brief is only as good as the citations. Legal reasoning involves putting together a chain of propositions, each supported by an authoritative citation, from which conclusions are drawn. In writing a brief, you are hoping that there is a published decision somewhere that has already gone through this chain and reached the conclusion you want to reach – that’s an easy case. You can cite that opinion, or secondary source, etc.
In the usual case, there is no citable decision on point that reaches the conclusion you want to reach. But, often, a court has engaged in precisely the reasoning you want to use in an unpublished decision. Court rules may actually prevent you from citing that decision to the court. Or, a previous litigant may have used precisely the sane reasoning in a previous brief. That is also something that you can’t cite to the court, but looking at previous briefs in something that lawyers do in crafting their arguments.
You wouldn’t lift passages directly from such sources, but it is perfectly acceptable to borrow the reasoning and structure of such arguments, and such borrowings are necessarily going to be without attribution, because court rules and convention limit the sources that can be cited.
I’ve sometimes thought that this would be considered plagiarism in other contexts, but it is not considered so in the legal world. (Again, I’m not talking about lifting passages word for word, but there are definitely times the language can be quite close.)
Internally, you’d expect the lawyer doing the research to bring to your attention the fact that the argument has been made in a prior case (even in an uncitable context) because (1) you’d want to find out whether the argument was successful; and (2) novelty is not a virtue in legal argument. There’s comfort in knowing that others out there are interpreting the key cases in the same way you are and are making similar arguments.
I didn’t mean to nitpick your question, deega. I was just saying what I would think, if I were this hypothetical employer.
I’ve been a non-hypothetical TA, seeing non-hypothetical students defending plagiarism. They knew it was plagiarism, they had been told over and over again that they shouldn’t do it, but they chose to believe that they should be able to do it because… because writing is hard, basically.
They need to be taught how to cite references accurately.
It * is* hard, that is why they are in school to learn how to do it.
Additionally, our district uses sites such as " turn it in", to check for previously submitted work.
@Cardinal Fang, as the hypothetical employer you have told us nothing about the employee or the writing assignment.
Should an educated, experienced writer who plagiarized and published something for the company be punished? Of course. Should a secretary who was asked to research a topic for an internal power point presentation be punished? Maybe not.
“they chose to believe that they should be able to do it because”
I have no patience for this non-excuse.
I do believe that there are thousands of high school graduates who were never taught proper citation, who have no idea that cutting and pasting from the internet is wrong.
And frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some college graduates who manage to never learn those lessons either.
And I do believe that sometimes it is possible to make a mistake, to have taken bad notes where you forget to put quotations around something, where you forget later whether this was a direct quote or a paraphrase. Didn’t Doris Kearns Goodwin argue that? Anyway, that’s why I might not fire someone immediately, opting for a suspension instead.
I believe that as well, but I believe it a lot more for something a person has been working on for months or years than something a person has been working on for days. Three paragraphs in a book, sure. Three paragraphs in two pages, no, I don’t believe that excuse.
Except they keep offering up that same excuse, even after being repeatedly told otherwise.
In the original hypothetical case, it wasn’t clear if employee was doing boss a favor by writing something up, if it was in her job description, and if she was writing something up as a favor to her boss, was it just for her own personal knowledge or was it intended to be distributed?
I meant to hypothesize that I had assigned this writing task to my employee and it would be distributed to more people than just me.
If she were researching something just for me, I wouldn’t have a problem with extensive quoting from other sources, but as Consolation says, I’d need the sources to be cited. In fact, if she were researching something for me, I’d want to see a lot of citation, because otherwise, I wouldn’t know whether to trust her sources.