August 8, 2003

Don't Define Plagiarism Too Loosely

To the Editor:

Dan Carnevale's article "Magazine's Essay on Plagiarism Appears to Have Copied Parts of Another" (June 20) is a needlessly harmful exercise in misrepresentation. The two examples of so-called plagiarism the article provides reveal similarities between quite bland and commonly made statements that could all too easily have been made independently. Real plagiarism involves the willful appropriation of someone else's distinctively expressed opinions (and typically