GOOD COPYING
Human beings are good copiers because copying is one of our survival skills. Right out of the womb, babies realize that they must imitate the people around them. They learn to smile by watching others smile. They learn language by listening and watching as the older people around them communicate; they process what they hear and see into a linguistic pattern, so that sometime during their second year of life, they can start using the very useful tool of language. If babies are lucky, they are born into at least middle-class families in which the language they imitate will help set them up for success. In school, children copy letters and symbols and turn them into written words and mathematics. Not until high school and sometimes not until college do humans encounter the opprobrium of plagiarism. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that even for adults, not all copying is an error.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez credits James Joyce and William Faulkner with giving him a sense of language and the sentence structures to use in magical realism. Even though we may be able to recognize these structures in Marquez’s writing, no one calls him a plagiarist. (Of course, the genius of his imagination is apparent.) Alexander the Great proudly confessed to patterning his life and role as conqueror after the Greek heroes of the Iliad: Achilles and Ulysses. Napoleon admitted to copying Alexander. Julius Caesar, like Alexander a master of both maneuver and siege, cried because he couldn’t match Alexander. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most original human beings that ever lived, taught himself to write by copying the English magazine The Spectator. Martin Luther King Jr.’s upbringing on the King James Bible is reflected in his speech and writing.
We humans learn by imitating. Many infomercials are based on this concept: A multimillionaire reveals how he amassed his fortune and sells his concept to others, so they can follow his pattern. Sports legends sell DVDs to show how they hold a club, a bat or a racquet, how they stand, and how they swing. Recently, in a developmental writing class, I had an immigrant student who always seemed to be two weeks behind the other students. The class would go over a certain skill, practice it, and then receive a graded assignment. The immigrant student (still acquiring the English language) would get an F or a D or at most a C- on the initial assignment, but if I did a follow-up assignment, she would climb into the B range of grades. As we approached the exit exam, the immigrant was one student that I was concerned was not going to pass and make it into credit courses; however, when I graded her last essay, she had achieved a B. I assumed (erroneously as it turned out) that someone had helped her since the essay was an out-of-class assignment. The week before the exit exam, the best student in the class confessed that the immigrant student had been copying every homework assignment from her and had looked at almost everything she did. I told the upset student that all would be justified on the exit exam and essay. Lo and behold the immigrant student passed both in the 60 percent range! She had learned enough through imitation to move on.
I admit that none of the examples above is true plagiarism because true plagiarism involves taking credit for a borrowed idea as if it were one’s own. In fact, the one attribute that all the above human examples have in common besides copying is that they honored those whom they had copied and acknowledged their debt. The core of plagiarism is a writer’s taking another’s ideas and claiming them as if they had originated in the writer’s mind. Quoting statistics and not giving a reference for them is plagiarism; arranging the statistics in a chart copies a style of presentation, but isn’t plagiarism as long as the source of the statistics is documented. Stating facts read elsewhere and not acknowledging the source is plagiarism; forming the facts in a series of parallel grammatical structures is patterning the information after a certain style, but is not plagiarism as long as the source of the information is documented. Copying the exact words of someone else and not indicating they are a quote is plagiarism; however, as long as the words are in quotation marks and the source is honored, no plagiarism has been committed.
Honor is at the crux of the matter. If students learn to honor their sources, then students won’t commit plagiarism. If students learn the difference between copying a style and stealing information, then students will be less inclined to commit plagiarism. Students should learn that civilization builds on the shoulders of those who came before the current generation. To copy styles, to learn from the experiences of others, to gain insight and knowledge from the words of others is praiseworthy, but those we borrow and learn from should always be honored and credited for what we learned from them.
In a recent novel I paraphrased Shakespeare by having my detective who was working with a policeman named Horatio, think There are mysteries, Horatio. Even though I consciously used Shakespeare’s phrasing (from Hamlet’s interaction with his friend Horatio about the appearance of the ghost of the senior Hamlet), I did not plagiarize. And in these lines I am honoring the bard and acknowledging some debt to him. On the other hand, in class I often use this quote: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” I always give Mark Twain credit for the quote whether I quote it exactly or paraphrase it; however, basic research reveals no known source for the quote in Twain’s opus. Am I wrong to credit him? The phrasing is certainly appropriate to Twain’s writing and the twist of ironic humor rings true to Twain’s sense of humor. So, I honor Twain by giving the credit to him, although the exact source is lost to time.
I have an extra credit exercise I use in my composition classes. I don’t want the students to worry about the source, so I tell them that it’s a great example of a long cumulative sentence that I got from a magazine article. I have them rewrite the sentence exactly, but substitute their own experience for the areas of the quote I have shaded. This is good copying because the students use the pattern but substitute their own original names and places. They learn to copy a pattern but they also learn to be original within that pattern. This is the goal of academic research and writing.
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