Newsletter 24: Why Claudine Gay had to go, a Mickey Mouse horror film, Tolkien’s victorious ghost, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and how to successfully write your book in 2024. Reflections on the plagiarism that brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay Harvard president Claudine Gay has now resigned. She made the…
Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has now changed some passages in work she wrote to address charges of plagiarism. Harvard’s investigation concluded, “the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two…
“I found it on the internet.” “My researcher found it for me.” “My coauthor write that part.” “My ghostwriter wrote that part.” [For ghostwriters] “My client wrote that part.” “I thought it was in the public domain.” “The author is dead.” “It had a Creative Commons license.” “I changed a bunch of words in it.”…
All books rest on other people’s ideas. There is no such thing as completely original content. Your job is to build on those ideas, not to hide where you got them. As an author, you have these responsibilities: Citing the ideas of others makes your work stronger, not weaker. You didn’t invent Net Promoter Score,…
Artificial intelligence writing software is now good enough to write decent student essays. If a student turns in such an essay, is that cheating? And what are we going to do about it? Aki Peritz wrote about the problem in Slate and Jeff Schatten pondered it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Both pieces include…
A New York Times article with an inflammatory title suggests that, according to new scholarly research, Shakespeare’s plays drew heavily on a manuscript by another author. For Shakespeare scholars, this is a revelation. For the rest of us, it’s a good demonstration of the difference between plagiarism and inspiration. The title of the Times article is “Plagiarism…
Melania Trump’s speech just keeps getting more interesting. Now we know how it happened and why some Republicans say it’s as inconsequential as My Little Pony. But no matter how you spin it, this is a disaster, not a nefarious conspiracy to make Trump’s wife sympathetic. The original speechwriters leak that they’re not responsible The New York Times…
Parts of Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention are strikingly similar to Michelle Obama’s speech from eight years ago. How does this happen? Plagiarism at this level is typically the result of sloppiness, not outright theft. If you don’t want this to happen to you, then you need to change how you work. What…