Plagiarism.

I'm all for sharing somebody's work with all due recognition - up to a point when it's their livelihood - if you appreciate it and want others to see it, as long as you do not make a profit from it in any way. Please let me know if I have somewhere not done this, as I would deeply apologise and put it right.

However, as any student knows, plagiarism is bad.

I have only been on the receiving end of it once, and only in a slight way.

On one occasion, I happened upon a year abroad-related post which had been shared on Facebook by my own university's Modern Languages department. I had a spare minute and went to read it. Only, I thought, this introductory sentence is familiar... I think I've written this.

So I had a quick glance through my own work, published on this very site, and found two separate posts in which parts of two sentences had been spliced together to create one new long one on this other blog.

Firstly, see here: Saturday 31st December 2011: New Year's Resolutions "It’s been a long while since I found the time, energy or inspiration to write on this website,"

Next see here: Friday 11th May 2012: People and feelings and (a lack of) knowledge "I don't have many good excuses, it's just mainly been work, and reading, and family, and friends."

Finally, see here: 9th July 2012: Reflections on a year abroad... "First off, It’s been a long while since I’ve found the time, energy or inspiration to write on this blog. I don’t have many good excuses, it’s just mainly been work, and reading, and family, and friends."
Granted, the addition of "First off," is new. However, the next bits look like a direct copy-and-paste job with the author not even bothering to change the capitalisation of "It's". My "website" now reads "blog". I am not sure that it did the first time I saw this. The commas are all in the same place. Of course, this is only a small piece of plagiarism, and I know that once you put anything on the internet that is your own work, you run the risk of this happening, but I still don't have to like it.

I left a comment when I first saw this with something to the effect of "I noticed you liked my words enough to copy them, please don't do it again", and subsequently subscribed to the comments page to see if the author would reply. She never did. I forgot about it until tonight, when I searched for that successful subscription email in my inbox, followed the link and found my comment had mysteriously vanished.

As I say, this is very minor for me and I'll live, but it may not be for other, ripped-off authors, and it doesn't stop it from being a niggle. I write because I like to explore ideas with the power of my own words. You should write because you, as I, like your own words. Otherwise, why are you bothering?