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Saturday, September 11, 2004
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“Ogletree said there will be a penalty, though neither he nor the school would specify it.”
FROM: Undergraduate Academic Plagiarism Committee TO: Charles J. Ogletree, Professor, Harvard Law School [see post directly below] SUBJECT: YOUR PLAGIARISM PENALTY This email serves to inform you that you have been found guilty of plagiarism. Harvard has asked the UAPC to determine your penalty, which is described in what follows. You have explained that you plagiarized because you “read over the [plagiarized] text and hadn’t realized it was not [your] own writing.” THE UAPC believes that it can be most useful to you in helping you in the skill of recognizing your own writing. Just as most people, when they look in the mirror, recognize their own face (there are exceptions - see the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks), so most people, when they look at a writing sample, recognize it either as A.] their own; or, B.] someone else’s. An example may make this clearer. Let us say you are Michel Houellebecq, the noted contemporary French novelist. You are about to send your latest manuscript off to your publisher, and you find the following two passages in it: Passage #1: It was about then that I started visiting prostitutes. There were lots of Thai massage parlors in the area - the New Bangkok, the Golden Lotus and the Mai Lin. The girls were polite, always smiling, and everything went well. At about the same time I started seeing an analyst. My case didn’t really interest him much, but I didn’t hold that against him - I was just one more frustrated, aging fucker who didn’t find his wife attractive anymore. At about the same time, he was called as an expert witness in the trial of a gang of teenage Satanists who had cut up some handicapped kid with a saw and eaten him. Passage #2: Bringing up a child in this flexible, thoughtful way takes time and effort. It involves extremely hard work as well as great rewards. But what worthwhile and creative job does not? Bringing up a child is one of the most creative, most worthwhile and most undervalued of all jobs. You are working to make a new person, helped to be as you believe a person should be! Remember: you are Michel Houellebecq, author of The Elementary Particles and other novels… Which of these two passages seems characteristic of your style and your thematic preoccupations? Let us see: one speaks of commercial sex, psychoanalysis, neurotic despair over the aging process, and sadistic depravity… yes, those are all, you (again, don’t forget: you are Houellebecq for the purpose of this experiment) understand, the sorts of things you write about, in the sort of style you write them in. The other passage, on the other hand, speaks without irony and in a trite fashion of the rewards of loving a child. Does this second passage sound like YOU? Obviously not. [It is by Penelope Leach, Your Baby and Child.] Fine - we said that our first example would be an easy one. Let us challenge ourselves a bit more with example number two. You are the Pope. You are about to publish a book of your thoughts. Here are two passages. Which one is your own writing? Passage #1: This is a hard truth for us to accept. As Monod writes, ‘The liberal societies of the West still pay lip-service to, and present as a basis for morality, a disgusting farrago of Judeo-Christian religiosity, scientist progressisim, belief in the ‘natural’ rights of man and utilitarian pragmatism.’ Man must set these errors aside and accept that his/her existence is entirely accidental. He ‘must at last awake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering and his crimes.’ Passage #2: The essential joy of creation is, in turn, completed by the joy of salvation, by the joy of redemption. The Gospel, above all, is a great joy for the salvation of man. The Creator of man is also his Redeemer. Salvation not only confronts evil in each of its existing forms in this world but proclaims victory over evil. ‘I have conquered the world,’ says Christ (cf. Jn 16:33). The full promise of these words is found in the Paschal Mystery. Again, let’s ask ourselves: If we are the Pope, which of these passages is more congruent with our thematic preoccupations and characteristic style? One brutally and arrogantly dismisses all belief in meaning or purpose as disgusting; the other (passage #2) affirms, in a civil, confident tone, the joyous reality of redemption. Remember that you are the Pope. Which passage is your writing? Good. Passage # 2. (Passage #1 comes from Straw Dogs, by John Gray.) This is fun, isn’t it? Time to try it on your own writing! Of course things will get more difficult as you restrict yourself to the subject of the law. Legal scholars aren’t much for style; and everyone’s writing about the same stuff (though much of your last book - the one that got you into trouble with the Committee - was a personal memoir). Nonetheless, the Committee would now like to invite you to play the Two Passages Game with your own writing and the writing of others. Your first assignment, due one week from today, is to turn in one sample of your own writing on the law, and one sample authored by a white supremacist. Please identify the correct author of each passage, and write a paragraph explaining how you were able to tell them apart. |