Plagiarism stories, says UD (who has followed them for years), are dully redundant. They’re not even stories in most of the world, by which I mean that if you’re in Korea or Pakistan or many other countries, plagiarism in the arts and sciences is rampant. Rampant. Americans get shocked when Americans plagiarize, and it does seem much rarer here… Though even here there are entire fields of endeavor (commencement speeches; sermons) full of plagiarists.

What makes plagiarism stories even duller is their uniform plot line. Someone discovers you’ve plagiarized. You deny, deny, deny, deny. The very idea! You are outraged. You make lawsuit noises. You know what it’s like to be unjustly accused of plagiarism, because it’s happened to you before. It happens because you are a popular, controversial figure, and other people are jealous and seek to undermine you. Who are you supposed to have plagiarized? That guy?? You’ve never read a word of his work!

Other people now look at the evidence, which makes it obvious that you have indeed plagiarized, and which also makes it impossible for you to continue to pretend that it’s just about this one liar trying to damage your reputation.

The next step is, again, virtually unchanged from case to case. Never admit to having consciously taken language from someone else and put it in something to which you signed your own name. Never. Instead, reveal that without knowing you’re doing it, you routinely (almost all plagiarists are serial plagiarists**) identify fiction writers (let’s say you’re a fiction writer) who have already written scenes that will fit in to your own stories perfectly. No – go beyond that. If you’re Shin Kyung-sook, reveal that you unconsciously were clever enough to choose a Korean translation of a famous Japanese fiction writer and steal that. A lot of plagiarists do this sort of thing – UD calls it obscuring the source. You make sure the writer is dead. You make sure the source material was published a long, long time ago. You make sure it didn’t do too well in the marketplace. Or, like Shin Kyung-sook, you choose translated material, which makes it less likely that a reader of the original source is going to notice what you’ve done.

Yawn.

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**

… South Korean literature professor Hyun Tac-soo has alleged that Shin also partly plagiarised passages from German author Luise Rinser’s “The Middle of Life” in “Please Look After Mom.”