The P-Word

I was reluc­tant to jump on the band wagon on what seems to be the hottest blog topic around these days but this inci­dent has made the local news here. Har­vard author, Kaavya Viswanathan two book deal was can­celled and her book yanked from the book­shelf. I had one thought: would this be a collector’s item? Kid­ding.

Pla­gia­rism has reared it’s ugly head again. Ms. Viswanathan allegedly pla­gia­rized from two or more authors and what a shame, too. So much for her writ­ing career. What’s that you say? Do I hear snort­ing noises? What about Janet Dai­ley you say, who was accused and found guilty of the same thing and still pub­lishes? Scan­dals like this don’t stay around—long, unfor­tu­nately. Another pub­lisher, maybe after a year or so will give her a pen name and pub­lish her again.

I know writ­ing is hard, look­ing at a blank screen can be dif­fi­cult but this is what you wanted to do, right?  Sup­pos­edly you had a tal­ent for…stealing, NO! I mean, for writ­ing, right? Why copy some­one else and with the inven­tion of the Inter­net, how do you think you can get away with it today? I find it amus­ing. I’m sure the authors involved and vic­tim­ized in this inci­dent do not. Amus­ing in that it was so bla­tantly obvious.

And plus, Publisher’s Weekly did a review where I snipped this part of the quote: “Viswanathan’s eye-rolling intel­li­gence shines through on every page.” How inter­est­ing. How­ever, the review­ers at Ama​zon​.com have been less than kind.

In col­lege, all my pro­fes­sor had to do was insert my paper into some type of soft­ware on his com­puter and it would high­light all the sim­i­lar phrases and guess what you got if it came back with too many sim­i­lar­i­ties? Yeah, F.

Where is the work ethic these days?