What is Plagiarism?

Not many of us know or understand what plagiarism means but most of us (and a really high percentage of most of us) practise it every day. We were already practising it when we were in school, copying homework and assignments from the brightest kid in class, all the way to university level. Believe me, I've been there and I know about the junior borrowing content and answers from seniors scenario.

This practice is so bad that so many young writers succumbed to it and many high-earning authors from bestseller lists are accused of it. Plagiarism gets worse when you enter cyberspace since there are no police watching over what we are writing in our respective blogs.

But, it's just repeated content without distortion, right? So how bad could it be to just repeat what has been said by someone else, in another form, listed under your name?

For one thing, there is the matter of copyright infringement. When something is published by a particular person, affiliation or company, then the copyright of the material belongs to the inventor of the thing published. To reuse the content without written permission by the owner of the material constitutes to infringement and the person who infringes the copyright can be sue and taken to court for legal action. Most of the time this does not happen, because... the person who infringes the copyright has to be caught doing it first.

I have been an editor of academic books for more than 3 years. It is my job to catch people doing plagiarism and submitting work that they did not produce themselves. I've gone through countless applications by wannabe writers and have rejected just as many applications because they do not know that they are conducting plagiarism and had the audacity to try to receive credit where credit is not due.

But you can't put the full blame on these writers alone.

One of the easiest book contents to write is the model test paper. You know, the one that are written based on past year papers and mirrors the level of real examination papers... blah blah blah. This, to me, is the easiest to write because of the 'mirroring' of the level. Change it too much and teachers would not be able to tell if it 'mirrors' the real examination paper. Keep it too close to the original question and you might as well just copy the whole thing over. It's a thin line between keeping it consistent and keeping it exactly the same. I cross the line a lot each day.

If I am doing my job right, I'd accept writers who know what they are doing and write what they are good in. The problem is, many people do not know what they are doing, and yet, they comment and criticize my decision, saying I don't know what I am missing out on. Ya, the job sucks in this way.

Combatting plagiarism isn't easy. But it is for a good and very important cause.

Plagiarism will, on the long, cause a decrease in the level of creativity the general writing population has. We must by all means prevent this from happening. Everyone can write, but not everyone can give you what you want, and not everyone can write well. It is a simple and sad fact and if no one is taking this matter seriously, in the end we would have so many brilliant instrumentalists, but no composers to write new songs for them to play.

No field would be able to advance, no technology will be able to improve. We would all be living like mindless, cracker-loving parrots... which surprisingly is fine for some people, but I hope not for you.