As a writers group, the Bush Curlews encourages budding authors of every age to develop their literary skills. However, all over the world teachers, publishers and competition judges (like ours) face the possibility that a story or poem provided for assessment has been plagiarized.
But why is plagiarism such a dirty word in the literary world?
Whether an author writes a short story or an article, or if they have written a poem, the main motivation for constructing their piece in the first place is to express their views, opinions or ideas.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, is an act of fraud. When work has been plagiarized the reader is given the false impression that the author had written or thought something that he or she had in fact“borrowed” from another.
The definition is simple:
If you turn in someone else’s work as your own it is considered as plagiarism. If you copy words or ideas from someone else without giving credit it is considered as plagiarism. If you fail to put a quotation in quotation marks, or give incorrect information about the source of a quotation it is considered as plagiarism.
There are other more obvious acts, such as when someone changes words but has copied the sentence structure of a source without giving credit.
Most cases of plagiarism can be avoided simply by citing sources. All the writer needs to do is to acknowledge that certain material has been borrowed and to provide the reader with enough information to find that source.
However, there is a limit to how much one should copy. If you duplicate so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not, it can still be classified as plagiarism.
In the literary world, there is no excuse for committing plagiarism.
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