Paranoid About Plagiarism

“You mean like inventing a colour that’s never been seen?” said my husband.

“That’s plagiarism,” I replied. “I invented that phrase.”

We were talking about how poor science fiction has generally been about predicting the future.  It has tended to underestimate exactly what advances we can make. Except I’m now giving my creative writing students a real challenge. They are to think of a world that does not symbolise our current one. They are to dream up something never been dreamt up before.

I even call the lead in lecture “Inventing colours that have never been seen.” I thought I’d made up that phrase. My husband thought he had. The truth may be that it has been around for a time. Or it may not have been. I’m equally convinced that I was the first to use the phrase “There’s no point in reinventing the wheel.” My husband is just as convinced that I wasn’t.

Both of the above cases just go to show that we might think we’re being original, but we’re probably just regurgitating something we’ve heard or read before but forgotten.  

There’s a lot of paranoia about plagiarism at the moment, especially at UK universities. Some students are so worried about being caught out that they hound their lecturers to pinpoint in exactly which lecture a particular lecturer made a certain statement. It’s quite embarrassing when you read the assignment and find yourself continuously quoted, though it’s a little flattering as well.

We encourage students to quote other academics. Then we complain when their essays are peppered with quotes and they don’t seem to have added any original thoughts of their own. Yet aren’t we expecting them to read and digest the works of scholars and then show us what they now understand? Their education to date has been about just that.

Sometimes it just comes down to there only being one way of saying something. What would Turnitin make of “Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone”? That must appear in hundreds if not thousands of texts. Are we stealing Newton’s research if we claim that apples fall from trees because of gravity?