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Reverse Plagiarism? Or, Did I Say That?

By Roy Peter Clark

During a friendly exchange of e-mails, Columbia Missourian editor Tom Warhover noted that the "higher standard" on plagiarism he mentioned was in place long before he arrived at the paper.  In fact, he noted, "the policy comes from, of all people, you!" 

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I assumed that the allusion was to an essay I had written for the old Washington Journalism Review in 1983, titled "The Unoriginal Sin."  Warhover had mentioned a textbook "used in all beginning reporting classes" at Missouri.  Sure enough, on page 506 of the seventh edition of "News Reporting and Writing," by four authors known as the Missouri Group, I found:

The authors then refer to a list on the next page under the title "Beware of Plagiarism!" Keep that exclamation point in mind.

On the list, attributed to me in a credit line, are the areas of danger, what Catholic educators used to call "occasions of sin": 

These indeed describe the categories I defined in my 1983 plagiarism essay.

But under each of these subheads is a paragraph written by one of the Missouri authors, though the reader of the text would assume it was written by me.  Take the last example: 

These, I assure you, are not my words.  In my original essay, I describe this practice as "a low-grade ethical problem."  Low-grade ethical problems, I'd argue now, do not require exclamation points -- nor would they be considered plagiarism.

I give credit to the Missouri Group for calling students' attention to the dangers of plagiarism, and for giving me credit for a list of basic ideas.  I assume that I gave the authors permission to use the material, and may have even seen versions of the text.  But to the reader of the text, it looks like I said things I didn't say and wrote things I didn't write.  I've got no name for that:  mis-plagiarism?  reverse plagiarism?  not-tribution?

Here's what I now believe:  that it is impossible to plagiarize from yourself, and that we should reserve the p-word for the crudest forms of malpractice. 

One more curious bit of history:  At the end of the section on plagiarism in the Missouri textbook is a list of suggested readings.  On it is the book The Imperative of Freedom:  A Philosophy of Journalistic Autonomy.  The author is John Merrill.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on November 28, 2007 (boomark / email).