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Is it wrong to plagiarize from an email?
Is it wrong to plagiarize from an email?
By Adam Grant February 25, 2014
"Copy and pasting emails is still copying." Reuters/Nir Elias
This post originally appeared at LinkedIn.
Last
year, before the launch of my first book, I promised my publisher that I
would send an email about it to my friends, colleagues, and former
students. I spent hours agonizing over the wording of the first draft,
wanting to make sure that I wasn’t spamming the people close to me, but
sending something they’d be happy to read. After several days of
tinkering, I finally sent it out.
A
few weeks later, I was in for a surprise. A colleague had written a
book, and he sent an email announcing it to his network, using the text
from my message… verbatim.
I was taken aback, but I didn’t say anything. I like and respect the guy, and after all, it was just an email.
I didn’t want to embarrass him or damage the relationship; I’m sure he
meant no harm by it. You could even make a case for interpreting the
event as positive feedback. As Charles Caleb Colton famously said,
“imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery.”
Later
that month, I received an email from a different friend who was
releasing a book. He had reproduced my message too, word for word, with a
few minor adjustments to reflect the content of his book. How could
this be? I would never use someone else’s sentences and pass them off as
my own. Plagiarism is a cardinal sin in academia, and one of the
perpetrators is a fellow professor.
Maybe
I was overreacting, though. If two different people found it acceptable
to use my words, I might be in the minority in thinking that it crossed
an ethical line. The authors clearly didn’t think it was wrong to copy
my email without rephrasing it: if they had any qualms, surely they
would have removed me from their email lists!
I
decided to let it go, but it didn’t go away. In recent months, it has
happened three more times. When I described the situation to people
close to me, they were mad. As a psychologist who studies motivation,
it’s my job to analyze situations that make people angry and approach
them with curiosity. To understand it better, I began reading about
plagiarism.
Traditionally, courts of law have distinguished between two ways that people can plagiarize the work of others. One is kleptomnesia, a lovely term coined by the psychologist Dan Gilbert to
describe accidental, unconscious plagiarism. It occurs when you
encounter someone else’s idea, forget the source, and come to believe it
was your own. Kleptomnesia has many famous victims, from George
Harrison of the Beatles to Helen Keller and Robert Louis Stevenson. In
my situation, kleptomnesia clearly wasn’t the culprit, since only people
with an eidetic memory—or a freakish amount of free time—would commit
more than 400 e-words to memory without realizing they came from someone
else.
The
other kind of plagiarism is intentional: it’s a conscious, deliberate
attempt to steal someone else’s ideas and get away with it. This doesn’t
seem like a plausible explanation either. My colleagues copied an
email, not a literary masterpiece.
The
Internet has cracked down on kleptomnesia and intentional plagiarism.
Now, online tools can instantly crawl through millions of records to see
if your writing is authentically yours. Yet the digital era has opened
the door for a third kind of plagiarism. It’s what I suspect happened to
my friends.
Let’s
call it cut-and-paste plagiarism. They started out by copying my email
as a template, edited it a bit, and then moved on to other tasks. When
they came back to it, they genuinely didn’t remember how many of the
sentences weren’t original.
It’s
all too easy to make this mistake. Most people are careful with books
and articles, recognizing that the safest way to avoid cut-and-paste
plagiarism is to not cut and paste at all. But email is a gray area. If
you like a phrase that a friend coins in an email, can you start using
it? Is it wrong that I started signing emails “Cheers, Adam” without
acknowledging that I was following the lead of my favorite professor,
Brian Little? If I cite him below each signature, should I also clarify
that I became especially fond of the habit after spending a sabbatical
in England, and list the names of the colleagues who also favor this bit
of British cheer?
When
I shared a draft of this post with another author I know, he replied
that e-plagiarism happened to him recently too, and he felt I was “being
too charitable.” After he sent a note announcing his book to an email
list, another author “ripped off most of my email word-for-word,”
laments this author, who asked not to be named:
“I
complained—to her, to the publication that sent it on her behalf, and
to her book editor. She didn’t respond. Her publication said it wasn’t a
big deal. And her book editor apologized profusely. Strange.
You’d
figure a writer ought to know better. Plagiarism is a no-no. And an
email sent to several thousand people isn’t private communication. It’s
much closer to something that’s published. The funny thing is, if she
had asked in advance to use some of my language, I likely would have
said yes. But since she apparently tried to pull a fast one, I didn’t
shed any tears when her book turned out to be a huge flop.”
Where
should we draw the line on what counts as email plagiarism? Needless to
say, I think a single word is fair game for the taking. Here’s my
proposal:
If
you use a full sentence or more from an email that someone else wrote,
quote it and attribute it to that person. Otherwise, take the high road
and rewrite it from scratch in your own words.
If
you’re one of the authors who borrowed my email message, I don’t hold
it against you. In fact, I’m grateful that you provided the fodder for
this post. I couldn’t have written it without you.
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In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, " Netiquette IQ - A comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and PSG of Mercer County, NJ.
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