Buttry on plagiarism

In light of the recent plagiarism scandals,* Steve Buttry entreats journalists to make their pre-writing processes more transparent and to be more diligent in their note taking.

As many people do when they write about plagiarism, Buttry "plagiarizes" most of his post (citation needed). Of course, he's not really plagiarizing. In fact, his whole point boils down to:

See, I lifted a lot of material for this post. But the quotation marks, attribution and links turn shameful plagiarism into honorable research.

Buttry (or one of the people he quotes) suggests that we make sure to put quotations marks around everything we paste into our notes from other sources. He does not suggest reporters immediately retype everything they read in their own words; that invites errors in transcription. Copy and paste can work, if the reporter takes the time to pay attention to attribution.

And now, because I can, here are some of my choice bookmarks to articles dealing with plagiarism over the past few years:

• 2 Universities' Plagiarism Policies Look a Lot Alike
• Dude, You Stole My Article

* I suppose you could call this an evergreen post, since there will always be "recent plagiarism scandals."

Related posts:

1. Plagiarism means something different now
2. Posner and Plagiarism
3. Plagiarism in east Texas
4. Plagiarism fallout in Texas
5. Ohio University student expelled for plagiarizing Wikipedia