I never done bad things

While I'm not actually, bar occasional outbreaks of Georgette Heyer, a fanatical reader of romance, I do enjoy the Smart Bitches, who are passionate, intelligent and snarky about romance. They have recently uncovered the (gasp!) scandale of the Great Cassie Edwards Plagiarism Debacle. Edwards is a high-profile and popular author of what appear to be slightly dreadful Native American romances, all heaving white bosoms confronting Noble Savages (half of them seem to have the word "savage" in the title, wince); she's also prolific, having published something like four novels a year for the last 25 years. She also, it transpires, makes up this rather considerable output at least partially by lifting ideas, phrases and whole passages more or less verbatim from a wide range of sources, mostly early 20th-century research works on Native American culture. The Smart Bitches provide a detailed list of comparisons from across a whole range of novels. It's pretty unmistakable plagiarism.

What has been interesting me about this whole thing is the horrible extent to which it's familiar. It's like marking undergrad essays. Detect wild swings in tone and register, yup. Hunt through likely sources or Google for a range of particularly egregiously different phrases, particularly those which are especially jargonistic or well-turned, check. Place essay and discovered source side by side, and marvel at the innocence with which a student (or highly successful romance author) fondly imagines that swopping the word order of two words and replacing a third with a synonym miraculously transforms the other author's whole sentence/paragraph into "your own." Give essay 0, write rude comments about plagiarism, refer to university court. Or, unleash discovery on Internets and watch the debate rage.

This woman is on record as saying that she thought (for 25 years) that she didn't have to reference her research sources in a work of fiction. This is so unbelievably like the kind of lame excuse a first-year student comes up with, I think my jaw literally dropped. When the hell did "research" become synonymous with "lift great chunks wholesale and verbatim without attribution"? I mean, the better kind of romance or historical writer (including George McDonald Fraser, mayherestinpeace) (a) gives you an appendix at the end with a list of their sources, and (b) has the grace, industry and skill to take facts from research and synthesise them into the work, rather than blatantly copying. Besides, Edwards's lame "I didn't know I had to reference research, the dog ate my bibliography" excuse falls flat on its face when you discover that she hasn't only plagiarised chunks of out-of-copyright research material, she's nicked a lot from an in-copyright and Pulitzer-winning work of fiction, thereby materially, for those few sentences, raising "her" writing to the actual status of lyrical prose. She cannot possibly expect us to believe she didn't know that was wrong.

But it terrifies me that notions of originality and moral ownership of ideas can become confused across such a wide spectrum of the world - 19-year-old student or 60-year-old successful author on different continents. Apparently there is some kind of weird relationship with Words here, where the mere fact of your desire to say something similar makes those words somehow your own. I can't help wondering if this is something to do with our technological culture, with the horrible authority it gives us to create straight into the official blandness of computer text. The university plagiarism issue has leaped to prominence in the last ten years - I was barely conscious of it when I started teaching, but it's an ongoing problem now.

Since computers have become rife as the mechanisms of writing, two things have, I think, fostered plagiarism and the belief that it's OK. One is the strange sort of games typing plays with status: if you're writing words on a screen and reading someone else's words on the same screen, I think they feel the same, equally authoritative, in a way that is intrinsically different to writing in longhand while consulting an actual book.

The other is simply opportunity and ease of nicking, i.e. the evils of cut-and-paste. I notice that the Smart Bitches have been able to document a lot of the Edwards plagiarising off Google - I suspect that Edwards herself owns most of the rather out-of-date books from which she nicks stuff, but the fact remains that it's fatally easy for my students to find relevant material with a Google search. There's an erosion of boundaries which says that if you're under time pressure (four books a year or an essay due), why not just cut-and-paste? Somewhere in the backbrain, "it's easy and no-one will notice" becomes "therefore it's legitimate."

There's a weird sort of disconnect here between effort and result, in that a minimal action (copying) is seen as a sufficient gesture towards the actual work (and it's hard work) of writing. Our growing happy crowds of plagiarists don't understand ownership, obviously, or effort, but mostly what they don't understand is writing because, in this computer/internet/bloggery age, anyone can write and everyone does. Writing well, or even properly, seems to be increasingly optional. Plagiarism is simply one facet of the incredible outpourings of inept waffle that threaten to swamp our civilisation. Or maybe I'm just a grumpy old academic. Either way, I don't think Cassie Edwards is helping.