A Novel Question: Can Plagiarism Be Unintentional?
We almost – almost – posted something last week about Harvard undergrad Kaavya Viswanathan's send-up of Ivy League college admissions in her now-withdrawn novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The reviews made it sound like a funny, timely, and even mildly thought-provoking read.
But it's probably just as well that we didn't get around to it. If we had, we would have felt obliged to spend most of this week posting endless updates about ongoing developments stemming from accusations that Viswanathan plagiarized parts of her text from another author. (To see the Harvard Crimson article that broke the story, and examples of the plagiarized text, go to www.thecrimson.com.)
One of the things that caught our eye about this story is Viswanathan's claim that the plagiarism was unintentional. She acknowledges that she read the two novels she appears to have copied passages from several times while she was in high school, but says she did not have the books with her at Harvard when she wrote her manuscript, and did not copy from them. The similarities between Opal Mehta and Megan F. McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings "were completely unintentional and unconscious," Viswanathan said.
Is such a thing possible? Can you plagiarize something without even being aware of it?
Well – maybe. Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl whose educational breakthroughs are portrayed in the play The Miracle Worker and who, in real life, grew up to be an accomplished writer and speaker, apparently did something like that when she was about twelve years old.
In 1892, Keller sent a copy of a story she had written to a family friend. He had it published in a small magazine. A reader spotted strong similarities between Keller's story and a children's story that Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, had evidently once 'read' to Keller through finger spelling. The scandal that followed left Keller traumatized and hyper-sensitive about plagiarism for the rest of her life.
So it is not inconceivable that someone might internalize a story so thoroughly that they eventually forget where the familiar words and images came from, and wind up presenting the material later on as their own work.
Can unintentional plagiarism creep into an admissions essay the same way it can creep into fiction?
It can, and does. In fact, admissions officers see a particular version of unintentional plagiarism all the time, in the form of application essays that are clearly based on the many 'model' essays published in books and on websites.
These essays undermine the admissions chances of the applicants who submit them. Ironically, it's not because admissions committees take it upon themselves to punish plagiarizers. Rather, it's because these essays themselves are so ordinary and dull. Any admissions officer who picks one up will have read a thousand other essays just like it, and will be hard pressed to tell the author apart from all the other applicants who used the same model. The real problem with a 'modeled' essay is that it wastes the applicant's best chance to connect with an admissions committee by conveying their own, unique thinking and character.
Here are 3 tips to minimize your chances of committing unintentional plagiarism in your application essays:
- Read a lot, and read widely. The more varied your reading is, the less likely you are to internalize someone else's voice and ideas and mistake them for your own.
- Write. Get in the habit of expressing yourself in words on paper (or screen). The more you write, the more you develop a feel for your own voice. That makes it easier to recognize when the words coming out of your head don't belong to you.
- Don't over-use model essays. If you want to skim through a few essays to get an idea of the kinds of things other applicants have written about, that's fine. But don't read a model essay more than once or twice, and don't read it too closely. Above all, don't settle for writing something 'as good as' a model essay. Set out to write something better. Many of the essays presented as models are really quite mediocre – which is another reason by 'modeled' essays hurt their authors' admission chances.
-- All Star Essays
But it's probably just as well that we didn't get around to it. If we had, we would have felt obliged to spend most of this week posting endless updates about ongoing developments stemming from accusations that Viswanathan plagiarized parts of her text from another author. (To see the Harvard Crimson article that broke the story, and examples of the plagiarized text, go to www.thecrimson.com.)
One of the things that caught our eye about this story is Viswanathan's claim that the plagiarism was unintentional. She acknowledges that she read the two novels she appears to have copied passages from several times while she was in high school, but says she did not have the books with her at Harvard when she wrote her manuscript, and did not copy from them. The similarities between Opal Mehta and Megan F. McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings "were completely unintentional and unconscious," Viswanathan said.
Is such a thing possible? Can you plagiarize something without even being aware of it?
Well – maybe. Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl whose educational breakthroughs are portrayed in the play The Miracle Worker and who, in real life, grew up to be an accomplished writer and speaker, apparently did something like that when she was about twelve years old.
In 1892, Keller sent a copy of a story she had written to a family friend. He had it published in a small magazine. A reader spotted strong similarities between Keller's story and a children's story that Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, had evidently once 'read' to Keller through finger spelling. The scandal that followed left Keller traumatized and hyper-sensitive about plagiarism for the rest of her life.
So it is not inconceivable that someone might internalize a story so thoroughly that they eventually forget where the familiar words and images came from, and wind up presenting the material later on as their own work.
Can unintentional plagiarism creep into an admissions essay the same way it can creep into fiction?
It can, and does. In fact, admissions officers see a particular version of unintentional plagiarism all the time, in the form of application essays that are clearly based on the many 'model' essays published in books and on websites.
These essays undermine the admissions chances of the applicants who submit them. Ironically, it's not because admissions committees take it upon themselves to punish plagiarizers. Rather, it's because these essays themselves are so ordinary and dull. Any admissions officer who picks one up will have read a thousand other essays just like it, and will be hard pressed to tell the author apart from all the other applicants who used the same model. The real problem with a 'modeled' essay is that it wastes the applicant's best chance to connect with an admissions committee by conveying their own, unique thinking and character.
Here are 3 tips to minimize your chances of committing unintentional plagiarism in your application essays:
- Read a lot, and read widely. The more varied your reading is, the less likely you are to internalize someone else's voice and ideas and mistake them for your own.
- Write. Get in the habit of expressing yourself in words on paper (or screen). The more you write, the more you develop a feel for your own voice. That makes it easier to recognize when the words coming out of your head don't belong to you.
- Don't over-use model essays. If you want to skim through a few essays to get an idea of the kinds of things other applicants have written about, that's fine. But don't read a model essay more than once or twice, and don't read it too closely. Above all, don't settle for writing something 'as good as' a model essay. Set out to write something better. Many of the essays presented as models are really quite mediocre – which is another reason by 'modeled' essays hurt their authors' admission chances.
-- All Star Essays
posted by AllStarEssays at 10:50 AM
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