Another plagiarism case

[julesjones]

The Smart Bitches have been posting evidence of repeated and extensive plagiarism by a well-known romance author. Cassie Edwards appears to have been copying passages verbatim from her reference sources, without bothering either to paraphrase or to acknowledge the source material. So far the series of posts is:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
part 4

Please note what plagiarism is -- it's the unacknowledged use of someone else's work, in effect passing it off as your own and thus claiming the credit for it. Exactly what constitutes "unacknowledged use" depends on context, but at the very least the passages cited by the Smart Bitches should have resulted in an acknowledgements page or bibliography. Copying word for word, as seems to have been done here, would require the passages to be explicitly marked within the text in many contexts.

This is something that gets me where I live in two different ways. One is that as a fiction writer, I'd be disgusted by someone who deliberately lifted my words and passed them off as her own, and mortified if I unconsciously did the same to someone else. It's something that many authors worry about from time to time, because we're magpies, and genuinely can retrieve something from the depths of memory without realising that it is a memory. But it's hard to believe that this was subconscious, given the extent of it.

The other is that in my day job I'm a scientist. As the English teachers and lecturers have been pointing out all over the comment threads, plagiarism is a serious offence in academia; and that goes for the science faculty as well. It is part of the basic ethics of the field that you do not steal the credit for someone else's work. Doesn't stop it happening, of course, and there are some appalling examples and quite outrageous self-justifications, but that's the ideal.

This really is unethical behaviour. More, it's bad writing, because simply copying a reference verbatim in this way generally leads to obvious swings in tone and writing style. That is in fact how this example was picked up. How did this get through the editing process at the publisher without anyone noticing? Either they didn't notice, which says one bad thing, or they noticed and didn't care, which says another.

And yet there's already a rabid fangirl in the comment threads, attacking the Bitches for daring to criticise her favourite author. It appears to be genuine rather than a troll (although one can never tell). It would seem that theft of another's writing is perfectly reasonable when it's an author she admires doing the thieving. I wonder if she'd feel the same way were the copyright dates on the books to be reversed.

Comments

[soshoni.livejournal.com]

That's really disturbing, that someone is rabidly defending this kind of thing.

[julesjones]

The problem seems to be that the Smart Bitches tend to use Edwards as an exemplar of really bad writing, so some Edwards fans think that the SB are constantly looking for reasons to put down Edwards -- and by extension, her fans. *Any* criticism of Edwards, no matter how justified, is then seen as them just being mean.

It doesn't really help that a lot of people simply don't think that there's anything wrong with plagiarism as long as it's being done by a writer they like. I don't know if that's the case here, but I've certainly seen it in previous plagiarism dustups.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

From what is presented, the text has been changed - I'm not sure exactly how much change you need to call it a paraphrase. For example:

"women considered this work of high importance, and when properly performed, it was quite as much respected as were bravery and success in war among the men."

versus:

"This work women considered of high importance, and, when properly performed, quite as creditable as were bravery and success in war among the men."

The wording is very close, but not exactly the same. The author has made at least some effort. In my own work, I probably would have gone with the original in quotation marks, which is one approach, but often you're told to cut back on the quotes and "use your own voice".

I detest this push to paraphrase, because it leads to error. Is it correct to say "creditable" instead of "respected"? Or has this paraphrase attempt completely destroyed the original meaning? I've seen this happen many times, especially with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which has elevated hair-splitting to an art. The only way to avoid it is to go beyond your source, back to the original primary material.

In my case, that will normally be a government document. As you know, in government, plagiarism is the norm. For legal reasons, everything possible is lifted verbatim. No credit is given since the crown owns the copyright. Where something is signed, it doesn't mean that it is their work, or even their signature.

I would put in a footnote, but novels do not have footnotes as far as I know. So I would expect merely a glib notice in the front or the back that some details about Native American customs have been lifted from the following books, and if you want to know more, you should perhaps consult them. (Just had a squiz at a historical novel on my shelf by Colleen McCullough. The notes in the back say that if you want to see the bibliography, you can write away for it. It gives a postal address.)

I wouldn't know how widely read Romance editors are. I think you're drawing a long bow here expecting them to recognize stuff from background material. That having been said, I am aware of a high profile case where the large parts of a novel were plagiarised from another, the editors picked it up, and the decision was to publish anyway and see if they could get away with it.

and that's plagiarism...

[(Anonymous)]

Your example is plagiarism, not paraphrasing. Too many exact phrases as well as part of the sentence structure. And rather than it be a norm, it's actually pretty reprehensible in the world of fiction, non-fiction and academic writing.

Anna
http://annangel.blogspot.com/

[julesjones]

What Anna said -- and what I said in my initial response, which seems to have attached to the main post rather than as a reply to yours.

Even word-for-word is not plagiarism in an academic context where the quoted material is properly cited as a quote, and in such a situation I would agree with you that exact quoting is often better than paraphrase. But this material was *not* cited. The reason for the uproar is not the copying itself, but that there is no acknowledgement anywhere that these are not her own words.

[julesjones]

As far as fiction is concerned, this is out and out plagiarism. She's lifted the wording, and changing a word here and there doesn't suffice to make it original material. But she hasn't acknowledged that it's lifted from another source (this is one of the things that has been checked). Using the facts is fine, but you don't get to use someone else's prose and pretend that it's your own.

It's not unknown for novels to have footnotes (the great and alas now late George MacDonald Fraser used them extensively), but it's more usual to have an acknowledgements page or bibliography.

It's not so much expecting the editors to recognise the source, as expecting them to notice the way the style suddenly shifts. If they haven't noticed, that's poor editing; if they have, it suggests that they think it doesn't matter that the style is so choppy. That's bad simply because it's poor writing, even if it honestly didn't occur to them *why* the style was choppy.