Hi Shallowford,
I'm starting to fade away for the night, so I'll be saving the pleasure of reading your story for another day, but I did decide to sneak in a peak at the introductory comments, and wanted to respond ASAP to the following:
Thanks to Lynn S. M., whose response to my “I’m Superman” discussion was heavily plagiarized.
You're welcome, but, ummm... May I request a clarification? I hope by that you did not mean to say that I did a lot of plagiarizing. I never intentionally plagiarize and would not want to have posted anything that had copied someone else's words without attribution; if you can point me to any other stories with phrasing such as what I had posted, I will delete the earlier post ASAP and will make my profound apologies to the original author.
Or did you simply mean that my reply to
this thread exemplified the sort of revelation one might see in a lot of stories? I would agree with this last item -- but exemplification and plagiarism are two very different things. To the best of my knowledge, my wording was completely my own. I was not looking at any other authors' works when I wrote that paragraph; I wrote it off the top of my head.
Sorry if my reaction seems a bit panicked or overboard -- as a college instructor who deals with actual plagiarism every semester (and with the serious repercussions to students who do plagiarize), I am extremely sensitive to the issue and to what does, and does not, constitute plagiarism. An accusation of plagiarism is not to be taken lightly.
I am looking forward to reading your story.
Joy,
Lynn
p.s., As I wrote above, I have started to fade away for the night. If I had been more alert, I would probably have gotten your meaning earlier. After I posted the above, it dawned on me what you may have meant, and I glanced through the story (again, I plan to read it properly when I am more alert) and confirmed that by the quote above you meant that you made extensive use of my earlier post in your story; in other words, you were trying to say that you plagiarized me, not that I had plagiarized anyone. *whew*
I am honoured that you liked my response in your earlier thread enough to use it as the basis for a critical part of your story.
And since you did, more or less, give attribution (if not in correct APA or MLA format
), and since you did do some paraphrasing (a lot more than some of my students do, at any rate), your "plagiarism" would be borderline, at worst. (I'm too tired to compare the original to the final product, but I do know that I liked your wording better than my own.)
And now I'm off to get some much needed rest...
