Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Lying, even when technically plagiarism, is still lying

A post on examiner.com by Laura Smith-Proulx made a straightforward comment about copying from someone else's resume:

It happens all the time - your friend has the same job, and you swipe a few sentences from his resume. While this is technically plagiarism, there's worse news for anyone who does this: your friend's resume ISN'T about you.

Keep in mind that a resume is really a marketing document, and YOU are the product.


For unapparent reasons, the business about Biden's copying from Kinnock's speech devolved into a discussion about whether this was or was not plagiarism. That really wasn't the significant issue. The important point was Kinnock's facts, copied by Biden, didn't apply to Biden. The Biden/Kinnock incident was an odd story in which plagiarism was used to sugarcoat something worse.

See IPBiz post: http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/08/significance-of-joe-bidens-plagiarism.html -->

mediamatters obliquely referred to the FALSITY of the facts in Biden's copying:

Biden did appear to drop his own family something of a notch downward on the economic and social scale to appear more like Kinnock.

[IPBiz-->] Biden's father and grandfather were not coalminers, so there was nothing truthful in Biden's substituting himself into Kinnock's life story. Other members of Biden's family had gone to college, so there was nothing truthful in that aspect. One can only infer mediamatters doesn't really care about truth.

Also:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/08/went-to-garden-party-joe-biden-hides-in.html

**Separately,

Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman write on US News in an article 9 Ways to Get on Your Professor's Bad Side:

9. Plagiarize in super obvious ways. No professor likes students who cheat. But worse even than plagiarism is copying in a way that's so transparent and obvious that anyone with half a brain could detect it. Like what happens when the professor enters the first few words of your paper into a Google search and finds, word for word, parts of your paper in the first entry. Look, professors think plagiarism is intellectual stealing, and, as the antilittering signs in New York say, "disgusting and filthy, so don't do it." But you add insult to injury when you copy in so obvious a way that your professor would have to be a moron to be unable to find your source.

Recall that Joe Biden, while at Syracuse Law, copied five pages of a law review article into his own paper, without citing the law review article. Joe Biden went on to become Vice-President. Jacobs and Hyman need to wake up.

***Also, under "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

see


Reality check for Vice President Joe Biden

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