The punishable perils of plagiarism Melissa Huseman DAnnunzio
Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Jessica Ruby
Welcome to the Department of Plagiarism Investigation.
The D.P.I. has dealt with numerous complex cases
in their effort to bring plagiarists to justice
and to rescue purloined texts.
The first form of plagiarism
that the D.P.I. regularly encounters
is known as brain child snatching,
in honor of the Latin word, plagiarius,
from which plagiarism originates.
Brain child snatchers sneak up on innocent papers
and copy and paste them
without citing any sources,
putting quotation marks around direct quotes
or changing a word.
They’ve also been known to steal and hold
particularly eloquent essays for ransom.
When brain child snatchers get together,
they form a kidnapping ring,
which involves brain child snatching
from multiple sources.
Some perpetrators have even been known
to commit self-plagiarism,
one of the laziest crimes in the annals of the D.P.I.
Also known as one-sided collaborators,
these odd balls snatch up entire texts
or small passages that they’ve written before
and present them as brand-new material.
Brain child snatchers and kidnapping rings
are easy for the D.P.I. to catch.
Just paste a few passages into a search engine,
and BAM!
They’re caught red-handed.
The more covert forms of plagiarism
include the wild goose chase technique,
in which plagiarists create fake authors,
book titles,
page numbers,
or other information
in order to cover up plagiarism.
And the old synonym switcheroo
in which plagiarists utilize a thesaurus
as their main weapon.
By substituting a synonym
for nearly every word in the document
and leaving the sentence structure
and order of the ideas the same,
plagiarists give legitimate paraphrasing
a very bad name.
Shoddy paraphrasing is also a key part
of variations on a smokescreen,
a technique in which multiple passages
are paraphrased,
then pasted together into one.
The thorniest issue that the D.P.I. deals with
is the misconception
that you can never be accused of plagiarism
if you use quotes and cite your sources.
This is most certainly not the case
because a paper that is made up
of passage upon passage of other people’s ideas
is known as a wholly quotable document.
This is considered plagiarism
since there are no original thoughts in the work.
Similarly, passage after passage
of too closely paraphrased text from multiple cited sources
is also plagiarism of the pervasively paraphrased kind
because the ideas still aren’t one’s own.
And lastly, the technique of revealing while concealing
is plagiarism because it involves selective amnesia
regarding one’s sources
in an attempt to cover up wholly quotable
and pervasively paraphrased issues in a text.
Some passages are meticulously documented,
quoted,
or paraphrased,
while others are presented entirely as one’s own.
As you can see, the D.P.I. has its hands full,
tackling all sorts of academic mischief and mayhem,
ranging from the petty to the outrageous.
Given the gravity of these transgressions,
you might be wondering why you’ve never heard
of the Department of Plagiarism Investigation’s victories.
That’s because it doesn’t technically exist.
But people, like you and me, can be our own D.P.I. agents
to fight plagiarism
and uphold the values of original thinking.
We know that the best defense against plagiarism
consists of writers who save themselves
time, worry, and effort
by taking the far easier road
of just doing the work themselves.