Plagiarism as Welcome Relief

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Clarissa

April 3, 2014

I could have never imagined that plagiarism would make me happy. When I discovered, however, that Zygmunt Bauman plagiarized his most recent book Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?, I was overjoyed. As one can expect from a book whose title question has such an obvious answer, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? was a great disappointment. Bauman states the most self-evident, boring things in it, without the slightest attempt to consider who might constitute his intended audience.

Now it turns out that Bauman didn’t come up with this exercise in superficiality on his own. The great philosopher lifted parts of the book from Wikipedia and other online sources. As much as I hate plagiarism, I’m happy to find out that Bauman is only partially responsible for the collection of trivialities he published in this book.

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3 responses to “Plagiarism as Welcome Relief”

musteryou

April 3, 2014

I once encountered a book in my local newsagency called “How to write fast whil[st] writing well.” http://www.amazon.com/Write-Fast-While-Writing-Well/dp/0898797381

This was way back in my twenties when I was naive and silly — so I bought the book.

I read it all the way through, and the sentences sure seemed to cling together and to the other sentences and paragraphs in a logical way. But afterwards, after having read the book, I was left with the impression that I had read nothing. The words seemed to evaporate from my mind leaving no impression.

Then I realized what the problem was with writing fast. You can, in fact, have a logical construction to your ideas and mechanically correct grammar, but the content doesn’t stick with the reader if the book is writtern fast. The opposite to a quickly written book would be Nietzsche’s meditations, which stick with you a long time, even after you think you have forgotten what you read.

I believe I learned a great lesson from this about the kind of writing and thinking I want to engage in. Even if it takes twenty years to get an idea quite right, you need to keep working on crafting it. Time doesn’t matter. Only the quality of the ideas you have really matter. Also, it doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t quite ‘get it’. If you have quality to your ideas, some sense of what you had to say will stick with them. They may never completely get the full gist of your concepts, but they will likely come away richer through the engagement with them.

That means that everything is at least following the right trajectory.

And furthermore, the latest theory on MH370 is that everybody was poisoned by Asian fruit. Isn’t that a far more consoling notion than the fact that they died violently by plunging into the ocean? I’m not sure, but it may be.

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David Bellamy

April 3, 2014

I find myself wondering: If you wrote the Wikipedia article you are quoting sans attribution, is it plagiarism?

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1. FD
  
  April 3, 2014
  
  According to my university, yes, quoting oneself without attribution is a plagirism-type offence.
  
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