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Monday, May 01, 2006

Don't Trust Snakes "plagiarism": An innocent mistake unworthy of further criticism

In my haste to bring the latest news about the Kaavya Viswanathan story to you, my loyal readers, it appears that I may have inadvertently internalized and/or blocked-and-pasted a paragraph from The New York Times and passed it off as my own work. Ironically, the similarity came to light in a subsequent posting in Don't Trust Snakes.

In my defense, I must divert attention toward the little-known world of so-called "blog packagers," while also pointing out that
  • I have been reading The New York Times daily for more than 15 years and seem to have adopted many of its distinctive phrasings as my own.

  • I admire The New York Times and had no idea how much I may have been influenced by some of its passages.

  • The mixup resulted from my sloppy notetaking habits. It appears that I may have copied down passages from The New York Times into my notes without attribution. Then, later, in transcribing my notes, I inadvertently failed to remember which passages were lifted near-verbatim from The New York Times. Still later, in typing up my entry, I had a defensible and/or good-faith belief that the passage in question was my own work.

  • I was simultaneously fatigued and overcaffeinated when I wrote the blog entry, and facing a stressful blog-entry deadline.

  • The New York Times passages like being made into plagiarized blog entries.


posted at 10:32 PM

1 Comments:

Blogger syp said...

You, you, copycat, you!

May 02, 2006 3:49 PM  

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