I have a confession to make: I am a plagiarist.
Once, as a freshman in high school, I had the youthful audacity to plagiarize Dante’s Inferno. I checked it out from the Audubon community library—alongside a stack of Sweet Valley High books, naturally—and, while I didn’t fully grasp the text, the language struck me. I copied down phrases I found especially lyrical and wove them into my own poems, padding Dante’s lines with bits of my own incoherent teenage verse. I can’t give you examples—you’ll have to imagine it. But trust me, it was nonsensical. And still, Dante’s words had such innate resonance, even I couldn’t ruin them completely.
I gave one of these poems to Mr. Ulrich, the English teacher I wanted to impress. He taped it to the wall alongside the other “ground-breaking” student work he’d curated. My little Frankenstein-Dante hybrid stayed there the rest of the year. I wasn’t worried about getting caught—but I felt gross enough about it that I never plagiarized again.
Well, okay. I sloppily cited a few things in college. And yeah, this blog? Basically a scrubbed version of LiveJournal entries, minus the emoticons and acronym-speak. The software documentation I write? Lifted from other manuals. But no one reads those anyway.
Plagiarism is catnip for the media—nothing gets the navel-gazing class going like a good intellectual property scandal. The latest: Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, who scored a half-million-dollar book deal at eighteen and wrote her chick-lit debut How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life during her freshman year. Now, after more than 40 similarities between her novel and Megan McCafferty’s books were uncovered, Kaavya claims she “unconsciously” copied them. It was, she insists, “a genuine, genuine mistake.” She blames her photographic memory.
Which begs the question: If your photographic memory absorbs other people’s writing and regurgitates it word for word, wouldn’t your work be a collage of multiple sources? Why limit your magical brain to just chick-lit? That’s the real tragedy here—a perfectly good photographic memory wasted on Cinnabon references.
From page 67 of McCafferty’s novel: “…but in a truly sadomasochistic dieting gesture, they chose to buy their Diet Cokes at Cinnabon.”
From page 46 of Viswanathan’s: “In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes from Mrs. Fields…”
Honestly? Kaavya should’ve read the Inferno. She could’ve produced the most harrowing YA coming-of-age saga in recent memory—and never gotten caught. Though How Opal Mehta Committed Carnal Sin and Subordinated Reason to Desire might’ve been a harder sell at Barnes & Noble.
