No More JBoard for Plagiarists?

Via JawaReport...

FoxNews has reported that the columnist Maureen Dowd essentially cut and pasted text from an online source in one of her columns and presented them as her own words without attribution.

In my field, we call that plagiarism, and it results in a big fat F for the class.

To be fair, however, almost no one is ever kicked out of school for plagiarism anymore. In fact, plagiarism doesn't even go on anyone's permanent record. Students just retake the class and the dishonorable discharge disappears...that, or the matter is recorded in a super-secret file that no one but administrators see.

And, of course, I don't see how we can penalize plagiarists considering we have one as a Vice President.

My favorite part of Dowd's squirrelly excuse, however, is the following:

Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, told The Huffington Post that the mistake was unintentional. She claims she never read Marshall's post last week and had heard the line from a friend who did not mention reading it in Marshall's blog.

In recent years, I've started telling my students even to cite conversations that they have with people if it influences their paper. I tell them that it's important because it might be that the person they are talking to is actually referencing a third person's ideas...so, while you might think you are just plopping in ideas from a conversation that I'll never find out about, the reader will nevertheless think you are plagiarizing your friend's original source. Now, I have an article to prove it happens!