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Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Step Away from the Keyboard

If you follow the political blogs of either stripe, you’ve heard of Ben Domenech, the 24-year-old Republican campaign worker and son of a White House staffer who was hired to be a "conserative voice" at the Washinton Post. Turns out the boy plagerized quite a bit at his college newspaper and subsequent blog positions. By "plagerized" I mean "cut and pasted whole paragraphs of other people’s work" and by "quite a bit" I mean "more than once."

But this is not about Ben. It’s about the response to the plagerism coming to light. Ben’s defenders stepped up and made statements like
"He was a teenager, give him a break"
"It’s not worth ruining his writing career over"
"Everybody does it–it just happens accidently"
And my favorite–have to direct quote this one: The allegations of plagerism "amount to nothing more than an 18 year old fresh in college being a bit too exuberant."

Exuberant? No big deal? Sit down, children, and pay attention while I don my writer hat and explain How the Real World Works:

Plagerism is just an academic word for "intellectual property theft"–no different than stealing the code out of
someone else’s software and using it in your own. It is against the law. You can be sued, your editor and your publisher can be sued. And "I didn’t know" or "I was just 18 and exuberent" won’t buy you any sympathy from the judge. It is not just a Big Deal, it is potentially The Biggest Deal in the writing, editing, and publishing profession. It will ruin your career, and it should.

And if you don’t know that, you need to get the heck out of the profession. Now.

I’m not being elitest or snobby here. There are minimum-entry requirements to every profession. If you don’t know or don’t agree with these core basics, you will find yourself in a world of hurt.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 10:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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