The Plagiarism Jitters

By Perri Klass
Draft

Draft is a series well-nigh the art and craft of writing.

A few years ago, I went out for a night at the opera, right after approving a book review I had written that would soon be sent to the printer, posted on the Internet and generally released into the world.

I had conscientiously checked and rechecked all the places where I had quoted the book, to brand sure that the writer's wording and the punctuation were right. So I did my usual final-infinitesimal disturbing over some awkward phrases of my own. The job was done. Every bit I settled into my balcony seat, and the lights went down, I was running through those now very familiar paragraphs in my mind, maxim goodbye to them, letting them go.

And then my brain got stuck. The very showtime line of my book review, I was suddenly convinced, was something that I had read somewhere else. I had opened with a "writerly" statement that was maybe out of keeping with my usual prose style — and it was suddenly obvious to me that, in reaching for that literary cadence, I had grabbed onto something that someone else had said. My opening phrase — information technology was simply 7 words long — hung suspended in my encephalon. It was bolded, information technology was italicized, it was underlined. Information technology was illuminated in the theatrical darkness of the concert hall.

And then, of course, I thought, I accept to get to Google. I have to become home and turn on my reckoner and search for that opening line (this was earlier I owned a smartphone). And what would I exercise if I establish it, what would I exercise if I was right? I conjured panicked thoughts of calling the editor, begging for one terminal shot at revising the piece. But information technology would be too late. Maybe if I left right now and called?

Merely of grade, I didn't get up and push my fashion out of my row. I just sabbatum through the performance, thinking about those 7 words, as my mental font grew e'er larger and e'er bolder. Sometimes I allow information technology go for a few minutes and listened to the music, but ever the thoughts came dorsum. If I had indeed taken it from somewhere else, so what? Well, I wouldn't wait for someone else to notice. I would phone call the editor and explain, apologize. I would offer to write an amends; they could post it online immediately. I tried to soothe myself with this hope, though at one particularly fraught signal in the 2nd act, I got equally far as returning an award I had received several years before, and writing a long, sorry, self-accusatory op-ed.

Merely this is non that op-ed, because when I somewhen did get home, later the operation, and plugged my seven words into Google, judge what, non a single match. It was merely a particularly astringent attack of endmost anxiety, the panic that writers feel at the moment when the final revisions are made, and the words go public property. Some writers regularly, predictably, discover one more correction, 1 more than error, 1 more problem, as soon as a slice has airtight.

There are probably writers who make all their corrections and changes at the showtime opportunity, and never revisit the question — but I am on the worrywart side of the spectrum, and my usual cocky-soothing mechanism during the editing process is to tell myself over and over that there is yet time to catch mistakes and make fixes — until there isn't, and and then I accept a deep breath or a potent drink and tell myself to let go.

Commonly my panics and my final-minute tremors are about mistakes or misinterpretations. Merely I have found myself, more than and more often in contempo years, worrying near inadvertent plagiarism, sitting over my laptop late at night and Googling any peculiarly highfalutin metaphors or plangent turns of phrase.

I worry that as I scan the words on the spider web, as I click on links and read polemics and paragraphs on websites I can't even name, metaphors and metonymies may catch on my encephalon like burdock burrs, with the tiny hooks that inspired Velcro. (And yes, I did only check whether anyone else has invoked plagiarism and the burdock plant in the same sentence; it's a poor matter only, every bit far equally I can tell, mine ain.)

I am not actually careless virtually picking up other people's words. My memory is non quite what it used to be (if information technology always was) and I take my share of those moments when I can call back everything virtually a volume or a picture (or a person) except the name. But do my senior moments hateful that I am more than likely to commit inadvertent plagiarism (considering I might read something and forget that I've read it) or less probable (because who can remember a phrase long enough to employ information technology somewhere)?

No, I think my anxiety, or at to the lowest degree its increasing fierceness, is actually rooted in the technology. Just considering it is now possible for me to know — and know instantly — whether a particular phrase has been used before, I feel the weight of responsibility. I can check this, and therefore I should cheque this. And while I'm at it, how many other phrases should I run, merely to be sure?

I have known the pain — and it is painful — of communicable a student plagiarizing, of seeing whole paragraphs match on a search engine. But there was nothing inadvertent about those cases. My fearfulness is non that I volition knowingly borrow narrative and get caught — my fear is that a sticky judgement or apt aphorism will be caught up in my least circumspect literary browsing, and I will find information technology all too readily as I search to complete my ain thoughts. That burdock burrs will grab on my socks and come abode to seed my garden.

O.Chiliad., i concluding time. I just went back on the Internet and searched again for that opening phrase, "pain and death are the physician's familiars." Nothing came up except my volume review. No one else had said it first, and no i has borrowed it since.

Perri Klass, a professor of journalism and pediatrics, is the director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Plant at New York University.