Why People Plagiarize

And what keeps us from cheating.

Plagiarism has been in the news this week in a way I’ve never quite seen before.

Jumi Bello was preparing to have her debut novel, The Leaving, released this summer when she confessed to her publisher, Riverhead Books, that portions of the book had relied on descriptions of pregnancy by other writers. Having not been pregnant herself, she told herself that she would “rewrite the these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make the story mine again.”

She didn’t do this as the book made its way through the publication process, and so the confession resulted in the book being pulled.

In a move that one could see as admirable, a public act of self-accountability, Bello wrote an essay for the LitHub website discussing her mistake.

In a twist too strange for fiction, it turns out that Bello’s essay about plagiarism contained plagiarized passages.

I have no desire to heap opprobrium on Jumi Bello, but when these sorts of incidents occur, I can’t help but be fascinated by the underlying dynamics. This incident reminded me a bit of an episode from 2006 when Kaavya Viswanthan, a Harvard undergraduate who had received a mid-six figure advance for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, her young adult novel about a young Indian-American girl who is striving to go to Harvard, but who is also trying to figure out how to “get a life” outside of her academic pursuits.

The commonalities between Opal Mehta and her creator became the stuff of irresistible marketing copy and the book quickly got a lot of attention.

Unfortunately, that scrutiny also revealed the similarities between Viswanthan’s book and Megan McCafferty’s concurrent series of YA books (Sloppy Firsts, Second Helpings). Viswanthan’s initial defense was that any similarities were “unintentional and unconscious,” but the use in some cases of exact wording made this claim unlikely.

Subsequent investigations revealed that Viswanthan had used many passages from a variety of different books, Opal Mehta ultimately being a kind of pastiche of tropes and language culled from others, and packaged as an original story, supposedly rooted in Kaavya Viswanthan’s unique biography.

The irony meter just exploded from overload.

Kevin Young has a fascinating exploration of this incident, mulling the structural and cultural dynamics at work that elevated and then discarded Kaavya Viswanthan as an author. I highly recommend people interested in these issues read it.

Opal Mehta was pulled by the publisher, and Viswanthan went on to finish her Harvard education and matriculate to Georgetown Law School. The Opal Mehta incident became an embarrassing episode rooted in a bad mistake that did not derail her life, which strikes me as a just outcome.

As the book was being pulled from the shelves, the New York Times went to the Harvard Coop Bokstore, and interviewed Maggie Hsu, the purchaser of the last copy before removal, like Viswanthan a sophomore at Harvard who wanted to see the book for herself to help her answer the questions, “Why would anyone do this?”

It’s a fascinating question, particularly in a day and age where access to digital texts and the concomitant ability to search for commonalities in an instant makes the odds of being caught extremely high.

The best book I know of about the ins and outs of plagiarism is Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words, which sadly appears to be out of print.

As a writer and writing teacher, I have a lot of first-hand experience with plagiarism. I once had one of my short stories that I had submitted to an Internet 1.0-era online workshop stolen and published by someone else under their name. This same person had stolen a number of other stories in some kind of attempt to build an online reputation for themselves, amassing credits. Even in the days of relatively crude search engines, it didn’t take long for all of the thefts to be discovered.

A decent number of my introductory creative writing students express some fear about their stories being stolen, and want to know if they should copyright their stories prior to submitting them for class discussion. Sometimes they’ll include a little copyright symbol © at the bottom, under the belief that this affords them extra protection should someone purloin their work.

Folks should know this doesn’t make a difference, that your words are copyrighted once they hit the page (whether they’re published or not), and again, thanks to technology, it’s fairly easy to prove the origin of just about any text.

The truth is that the vast majority of what gets written in an introductory creative writing class is not worth stealing, but it is an excellent sign when students are worried about their work being stolen because it means they are invested in doing something good, something original, something that someone else might want to steal. Those students will never plagiarize.

Of course, many of our early works are so derivative of the kind of writing that sings to us, what we produce may not be plagiarized, but neither is it original. Kaavya Viswanthan took this impulse too far, literally copying the texts she was inspired by. Over time, I started to think of them as “karaoke stories,” efforts where we’re essentially singing someone else’s tune, but while the similarities are obvious, the differences (usually in quality) are so apparent, no one would consider the work plagiarized.

My own first forays were essentially Raymond Carver karaoke, which was hilarious given that I didn’t know a damn thing about the quiet desperation of working class people in search of love and human connection. One of my first published stories (“On the Set, printed in McSweeney’s Issue 4) does not plagiarize Donald Barthelme, but it is so indebted to his tone (what I call “ecstatic deadpan”), it’s like I’d written an original song, but decided to perform it as an impression of an instantly recognizable singer.

This is simply how developing as a writer goes for most folks. For sure, there are some who seem to emerge fully formed from their earliest efforts - I’ve encountered this a couple of times even in introductory courses - but these are rare geniuses, like the four-year-olds who can pick up a violin for the first time, and somehow make their pudgy little fingers perform Tchaikovsky.

Achieving “originality” is a process that requires the writer themselves to be invested in the goal. And of course, originality is not confined to style or expression, but also takes shape in the realm of ideas. This is what I try to orient students toward from the get-go.

People plagiarize when the reward of stealing someone else’s expression is greater than the reward of creating their own. If there is a lucrative book contract or positive praise or attention on the other side of that kind of choice, it becomes explicable. There is a long history of famous popular historians and public intellectuals (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Fareed Zakaria) failing to credit the language of others in their work. These are often rooted in hubris and carelessness, and it’s interesting to consider how these folks get to retain their reputations and are forgiven for these transgressions.

Jumi Bello deciding to write an essay about confessing her own plagiarism strikes me as a plea for attention. Then plagiarizing portions of that essay is inexplicable to me.

My writing courses were (are) essentially plagiarism proof. I say this without pride or hubris, but from a place of experience and experiment. There is no particular magic to it. I simply design the course to emphasize the writing process as opposed to the product of that process. Assessing students on that process means someone showing up with a purloined effort at the end of a unit and trying to pass it off as your own without the supporting material that’s part of the process will simply not work.

The other thing I try to foster is intrinsic interest and value in engaging with the writing process. Not to be cheesy, but it actually does work when students see that cheating on an assignment really does mean cheating themselves.

James Lang’s book, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty is the definitive look at the structures and processes of schooling that makes cheating (like plagiarism) not the work of a no good scoundrel who wants to cheat their way through life, but an often rational response to a system that forces students into a strategic mindset in order to survive schooling. This does not excuse academic dishonesty, but it does explain it, and Lang’s book works through ways to structure a course, and communicate your educational values that will make cheating of any kind significantly less likely.

My last plagiarism case as an instructor came in 2006 in a technical writing course when one student, as part of a group project, copied and pasted their portion of the collaborative document. This issue was uncovered by the other group members before I even had a chance to assess the work. When questioned, the student who had done the copy and pasting said they “knew it was wrong,” but did it anyway because they were confused about what they were supposed to be doing, and didn’t want to let down the rest of the group by not completing their part.

Fortunately, this became what you call a classic teaching moment. The student who copied and pasted learned that they had to practice a little agency and speak up when they’ve lost the plot of what they’re supposed to be doing. The group members who reported the plagiarism learned that it’s good to head off that kind of problem, but that a shorter, less traumatic distance could’ve been travelled by making sure they were checking in with and supporting each other in the process, rather than turning to the instructor to police the problem.

I learned that I needed to do more work to make sure that students weren’t adrift inside of their groups.

No harm, no foul all the way around, provided we all learn how to do better next time.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I recommend places that are much better for reading those beach read books than reading at the actual beach.

BookRiot has a list of “40 of the Best Summer Reads”, which, as I argue in my article linked above, would be much better to read in a hammock, than on the beach.

Writing at LitHub, Bud Smith (author of Teenager) recommends an interesting array of “road trip” novels, including True Grit, Lonesome Dove, and To the Lighthouse.

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced last week. My prediction of the fiction winner was incorrect. Instead of The Trees by Percival Everett, it was The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Recommendations

All books linked here are part of The Biblioracle Recommends bookshop at Bookshop.org. Affiliate income for purchases through the bookshop goes to Open Books in Chicago.

Affiliate income is up to $108.45 for the year.¹

1. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
2. Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose
3. First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas Ricks
4. The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee
5. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Earl T. - Brooklyn, NY

A definite interest in historical narratives here. Since I think it’s a shame that Stolen Words isn’t in print anymore, I’m going to recommend one of Thomas Mallon’s novels, given he writes some of the most interesting historical fiction around, often hewing closely to fact, right up until he doesn’t. The choice is Two Moons.

That’s all for this week folks. If you’re reading something right now you’re particularly enjoying, why not give a shout in the comments?

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Take care,

JW
The Biblioracle

1. I’ll match affiliate income up to 5% of annualized revenue for the newsletter, or $500, whichever is larger.